STYLUS PUBLICATIONS has recently initiated a program of publishing educational books in this country which have their origin in other English-speaking countries. The English publisher Kogan Page is the source of a good many of these. Some of the authors are British; others are Australian.
This is a welcome development, if only because it widens the range of texts, ideas, and approaches available to American faculty developers and others interested in the improvement of teaching and learning. Moreover, it's always a good thing to see what our counterparts in other countries are doing and how they are faring. They face some of the same problems we do--certainly, an atmosphere of straitened resources for higher education, the challenges of technology--and some different ones. British higher education is held to standards of assessment, by outside evaluators who have the power to affect funding radically, which Americans can hardly imagine.
So I welcome the Stylus program and the Kogan Page books which it brings to the American scene. Having said that, I must admit that Teaching and Learning Materials and the Internet, written by Ian Forsyth, an Australian Education Officer who has taught in Singapore, doesn't add a great deal to the current discussion of educational uses of the Internet.
Forsyth divides his book into chapters which, though each of them makes sense, raise questions about order:
Preparing material for the Internet
Why use the Internet for teaching and learning materials?
General considerations
Getting started: the Internet and instructional design
Forms
Specific considerations
Cost considerations, economic benefits and budgets
Developing areas
Learners and the Internet
He follows these with an A-Z of the Internet, which will be useful to anyone who is a beginner or intermediary user. He is also gratifyingly level-headed, rather than the kind of uncritical, oh-wow, enthusiast who sometimes authors these books. He comments, for instance, that most of the courses already being offered on the Internet "are a 'knee-jerk reaction' or an 'increasing the institution profile' exercise. In other words, most of the courses are not purpose-designed. In both cases the effect is that courses are retrofitted to the technology." This caution is a salutary example for readers in states--like North Carolina--where there is considerable pressure from top administration to establish a profile in distance learning.
Nevertheless, I found myself disappointed with Forsyth's book. Not only did it not tell me much that was new (perhaps unfair to blame him for that), it dispensed its information in a repetitious way, heavy on the bullet points but sometimes marred by jargon. This is a slightly worse than typical passage:
The monitoring of practicals to provide the sanctioning of learning on the Internet is possible. However, when planning the materials and it is apparent that practical activities are required, there will be a need for this requirement to be addressed and a realistic solution to be referred to in the material. This means notifying learners about:
This is common sense (isn't it?) made to look complicated, at the expense of lucidity and even grammar.
On the other hand, efforts to clarify where we stand with learning on the Internet--how and why to begin trying to do it, what is involved, and especially the cautions and risks which should temper undue hysteria, are always welcome.
Merritt Moseley,
UNC-Asheville