ITEM 2.

In May, 260 10-15-year-old students from various schools throughout North America and Norway shared their visions of what they would like the world to look like when they grow up and talked about steps they could take to make sure it happens.

Participating teachers used their home or classroom computers to link their classes with those of colleagues in other states and countries. The two-week project culminated on Mother's Day when dozens of North American kids "met and talked" via computer with new Norwegian friends who were celebrating a children's festival in the cities of Arendal and Tromso, Norway.

The success gave birth to a new project, KIDS-91. The ambition this time is to get as many kids as possible in the age group 10 -15 to participate, from as many countries as possible. The global dialog has already started and will continue until May 12 1991. Part of it will be electronic - for those who have access to this technology - part of it will be by mail or in other forms.

We want to collect the childrens' responses to these four questions:

1. Who am I?,
2. What do I want to be when I grow up?
3. How do I want the world to be better when I grow up?
4. What can I do NOW to help this come true?

We also want them to draw themself in their future role/world. The responses will be turned into an exhibition that will be sent back to the kids of the world.

Whether you teach geography, environmental studies, English or another language, computers, or art, there's an opportunity for you to participate. Some schools are also getting involved in KIDS-91 on an interdisciplinary basis, including teachers from a variety of subjects.

The goals of KIDS-91 are three-fold:

1. to help students realize their personal visions through participation in an inter-active international initiative,
2. to empower kids by demonstrating how they can directly effect social change while also developing such marketable skills as keyboarding, wordprocessing, creative writing,telecommunica- tions, video production, etc., and
3. to raise student consciousness in the "global village" in which they live, as well as that of every person who comes in contact with the KIDS-91 project.

For more information, send email to the KIDS-91 project coordinator:

Odd de Presno, 4815 Saltrod, Norway (Europe).
Internet: opresno@coma.uio.no
CompuServe ID=75755,1327 , TWICS (Tokyo)=ODDPRESNO
MCI Mail=OPRESNO, MicroLink (United Kingdom)=MAG220
BBS System at +47 41 31378 (300-9600 bps CCITT.
V.22bis, V.32 up to MNP-5, 24 hours).

ITEM 3.

Below is a brief description of a new project which is being under- taken at the University College of Central Queensland. We would be interested in hearing from anyone who has materials to share -- we would like to avoid re-inventing wheels!

WHAT IS THE CAL/SML PROJECT?

The CAL/CML Project is a concentrated effort to produce Computer- Assisted Learning Materials and Computer-Managed Learning tools to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of nursing education. University College of Central Queensland (UCCQ) offers two programs for nurses:

• a part-time external B.Hlth.Sc.(N) for registered nurses
• a full-time Dip.Hlth.Sc.(N) for school-leavers and mature students who are seeking to become registered nurses.

This latter program is taught on a full-time basis and requires students to come to the main campus in Rockhampton, but will incorporate a number of features which call upon distance education technology. Because of this we have sought (and obtained!) a grant of $300,000 from the Australian National Priority Reserve Fund for the development of Computer-Assisted Learning materials and Computer-Managed Systems.

The project will initially develop materials for the pre-registration Diploma of Health Science (Nursing) program. Later materials will be for post-registration degree-completion programs and in-service programs for practicing professional nurses.

Our program serves a very spread-out geographic area with only a few small centres of population and hospitals. Students in the preregistration program are considered to be studying 'on-campus' but will be placed in centres some 300-500 km apart for their clinical practice. During these placements students will need to access instructional material available to students on the main campus and both instructors and students will need to communicate readily with 'home base'. The complexities of arranging the clinical schedules for both staff and students are also considerably greater than in an urban-based program since travel and accommodation arrangements must be considered as well as the nature of the educational experience.

All of these factors have led us to explore the possibilities of putting as much information as possible into independent-study format which can be made available to students on diskette for use in regional centres. We are also in the course of stretching the available communication system to its limits and developing a complex computer-based scheduling and student-grade- reporting system which can be accessed at regional centres.

WHY DO IT?

Student nurses must learn a great deal of factual material, and must be able to apply the information quickly and safely in a wide variety of clinical situations. This project will develop materials to help

• safety; patients won't suffer the consequences of a wrong decision
• repeatability
• experimentation
• individual pacing
• independent learning

WHY IN THE SCHOOL OF HEALTH SCIENCE, UCCQ?

We have a rare opportunity to develop a new Dip.Hlth.Sc.(N) program "from scratch". We have made a deliberate choice to put a great deal of our effort into developing new, more effective approaches to learning rather than simply re-developing a standard nursing education program.

The School of Health Science is expected to provide initial professional preparation for nurses in the Central Queensland area (close to 'Crocodile Dundee country'!). While there is a great wealth of potential clinical experience available to students and their large geographic spread of these resources does mean that we are under some pressure to develop imaginative ways of linking students and staff to the main campus.

WHAT WILL THIS PROJECT REALLY INVOLVE?

In 1990 we will:

• establish a 20-station dedicated student learning lab
• develop and test first year Dip.Hlth.Sc.(N) learning materials
• further develop a database of available CAL/CML materials and transfer the database to a publicly-accessible system.
• further develop and trial a student management system for clinical placements
• initiate development of second year materials
• support relevant student projects developing CAL/CML materials
• promote and document the project for use by others.

Note: I am only posting this message and cannot act as an intermediary for any people on the net who want to get connected. Please contact the secretariat or one of the constituent organizations/networks for further information.

Edis Bevan
AEB_BEVAN@VAX.ACS.OPEN.AC.UK

In the absence of any explicit guide for interpretation, such as the use of symbols or explicit expression, participants will imbue a statement like, "Sure, that makes sense..." with the tone, and thus the meaning, that builds on previous knowledge of the sender. If on-line participants know each other off-line, they will extend that relationship into a computer conference. This allows conversational tones that ordinarily don't translate well among strangers in a computer conference, like subtlety and sarcasm, to be conveyed among people who understand each other within the context of communication systems which are more information-rich. If participants know each other only on-line, meaning can still be inferred if enough computer conference experience has accumulated to allow them to "read" each other in a conference environment. This is particularly true if participants carry on a meta-discussion, that is, a discussion about how they are discussing things.

Relying on previous experience with a conference participant carries more risk than we might presume. The sender may not use the phrase, "Sure, that makes sense..." the same way each time, or may use it in a way that s/he feels the receiver will understand it. Because participants presume to understand what each other means in these circumstances, they create meta-messages on an unconscious, often unshared basis without feeling a need to check for accuracy. This can often lead to confusion and/or back peddling: "You thought I was mad when I said that (in a computer conference)? No, I was laughing at the time, honest!"

If there is no previous relationship to draw on, readers will imbue messages with some meaning, however unrelated it may be to the intentions of the sender. Perhaps, "Sure, that makes sense..." is a popular colloquialism that generally means "That doesn't make any sense." Perhaps a reader heard it recently in a movie and related to it for some reason. Whatever the inspiration, in supplying the meta-information needed to make a communication whole they create a reflection of themselves. This is important enough that it is worth re-stating: in the absence of information to guide our interpretation of electronic messages, the meaning we bring to them is in many cases a statement about how we feel about ourselves.

Compounding the problems associated with CMC's lack of meta- information is the fact that computer conferencing feels more interactive than it really is. Very rarely does it occur on a real-time, synchronous basis. Instead it blends spontaneous and reflective asynchronous interactivity. Participants will often answer messages immediately after reading them, as though the words were just spoken to them in a real-time conversation. (In the PortaCOM conferencing system these often come in the form of comments, and share the same subject line as the message to which they are reacting.) Thus participants will use their first impressions of what they feel a sender means, as they do in most other communication systems. In so doing, readers often interpret messages in the context of their own understanding, not the author's, and thus outside the realm of a shared meta-understanding. These spontaneous interactions are then often followed by new, more reflective messages, usually related but not directly attached to a previous message. In the PortaCOM conferencing system these are often, but not necessarily, new notices, that use a new subject line.

How do we bring any of this to bear of the quality of a computer conference? In PortaCOM, the correct use of comments vs new notices as described above can be helpful. It can also be helpful to make CMC participants aware of the nature of the medium in which they are involved by encouraging them to develop a meta-perspective of the computer conferencing environment.

One exercise I used to promote this awareness asked students to express in a computer conference the following four emotions: joy, anger, attention-demanding, and disgust. They were not allowed to use the typical symbols, like :-) and 8-0, but were allowed to create their own. The following week they were asked to reflect on their experience and conference about the flatness of the medium as a positive and/or negative attribute.

The assignment was difficult and students were quick to tell me so. Most students commented on how hard it was "push feelings through a computer screen," especially when they weren't actually experiencing them. They also said it was equally hard to pick up the feelings expressed by others, unless the feeling was overtly identified by the sender, which some of them did. This identification became the meta-message.

But at the same time, the students came to understand that the medium's lack of emotional malleability was simultaneously one of its strengths. The flatness of the environment forced participants to express themselves as clearly as possible in order to minimize misinterpretation, that is, to minimize the dependence on meta-messages. The conferencing environment also encouraged a mind-to-mind connection that might not be so easy face-to-face or on the phone. To some participants it seemed like a relief to be in an emotional void for awhile. The issues, not the people, became the focus. Meta-messages became more abstract, less contextual and in some ways, less necessary.

End of the Online Journal of Distance Education & Communication