As unlikely as it may seem, this paper is the result of a literature review that we developed under a consulting contract. The goal of the contractor was to establish a rationale that might lead to a fundable idea. Our goal was to make some extra money. As a result of putting together the review we learned a great deal about the rural South, the rural United States and, we assume, a good many other rural areas throughout the world. (Barbara was raised in rural North Carolina. John grew up in suburban Philadelphia but has lived in the South for over 30 years). Both of us were moved by our work on the consulting project, but it wasn't until it was well along that we really began to reflect on the contribution of our field, and ourselves, to the plight of rural communities.
Our goal in this short piece is obviously to get us all to stop for a moment and think, not of learning communities, or on-line chats and constructions at a distance, but of plain old communities; not of how much money we can make selling our courses on line, but how our on-line courses might help develop a community which would like to hold on to its children and grandchildren; not of what the system does for those of us who are privileged, but what it does to those who are not. We think maybe the first step for folks in Educational Technology might be a community-based needs assessment. Then maybe a systems perspective...
About Interactive Papers
The "Interactive Paper Project" developed by Jim Buell and Jim Levin of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides a simple way to create interactive papers using a web-enabled database thereby allowing a wide range of writers to create much richer ways to interact with their readers.
An Interactive Paper is stored in a database with each "chunk" of the paper to be commented on stored in a separate database record. The author can select what these chunks are, whether multiple paragraphs, single paragraphs, multiple sentences or single sentences. When a reader sees the paper, a "button" for making or reading commentaries appears after each chunk of text. Each reader can see the commentaries made by others, and can either add a separate commentary or can respond to a commentary. By responding to a commentary, a reader is joining in a "thread" of conversation between the writer and one or more readers, contextualized by the part of the paper being commented upon.
There are two different ways of viewing and commenting on this paper. In the "linked commentaries" view, a reader sees the paper and the commentary buttons, and only sees the commentaries when he/she selects it from a selected button. In the "inline commentaries" view, a reader see the paper with all commentaries displayed immediately following the chunk for which they are a commentary. Each view is useful for different purposes, but any comment entered through one view is seen through the other view. This concept of an interactive paper being an entity that can be viewed in many different ways depending on the viewer's goals is a way in which this use of interactive media is qualitatively different from the more static medium of print on paper.
We of course welcome your comments on the substance of this interactive paper by Levin. We also welcome your comments on the use of this Interactive Paper format, especially your feedback on whether this is useful for broader use in future issues of this International Journal of Educational Technology.
