John S. Atkinson School of Environmental and Information Sciences, Charles Sturt University P.O. Box 789, Albury NSW 2640, Australia. phone+61 60 519 947 fax +61 60 519 897 Email: jatkinson@csu.edu.au Home Page: John S. Atkinson [HREF 12]
In this paper we wish to look at the underlying anarchic nature of WWW publishing and the limitations this presents for on-line education. We will argue that the very nature of the flexibility of on-line publication gives rise to many undisciplined publication efforts, some of which are pure vanity publications. These publications are ephemeral by nature of residing on a server, and are even more ephemeral as they can disappear overnight by intent or accident. As references are made by means of hyper-text links, much of what is said can no longer re'viewed' in both the literal and conceptual sense of the word. This, however, runs against the basic tenets of academic scholarship.
So what are the alternatives?
One of the biggest revolutions to occur in the publishing field has been heralded with the introduction of the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW is the Internet's electronic publishing protocol and it offers many advantages over the traditional printing process mentioned above. For example it is able to offer not only formatted text and graphics materials, but also it is able to integrate hypertext and multimedia into a document. These later facilities allow references to be made to material external to the current document which can only be dreamed about in the traditional printed format.
The greatest advantage of the WWW is that everyone can now become a publisher. The traditional costs of printing are a thing of the past as the only cost associated with WWW publishing is that of the author preparing the material and then uploading the details to a server connected to the Internet. This exciting development in publishing will revolutionise the way we present published material. Unfortunately it will also introduce a number of disadvantages that need to be addressed. In particular the general lack of quality control associated with an electronic publication is a real concern.
There are many fields that WWW publishing can benefit. All professionals needs to have access to a rich source of material and such material can be readily made available via the WWW. For example in the educational field, WWW publishing can make available material that are relevant and up-to-date at a fraction of the cost. Currently many traditional paper based teaching packages for distance education students need to be prepared months in advance and these can become dated and irrelevant. The WWW has the ability to publish and introduce new articles easily and without undue time delays.
"Error 404 File not found.What happened is that --assuming the URL was correct in the first instance-- that the authors of the document have moved it from one location to another. Often material is reorganised on the network to make its use either more logical or more efficient. Often the authors will 'fix up', ie. update most of their own internal links, the links from their own homepage. Everybody else, however, who has made a direct link to the relevant document will run into a dead end. Few WWW authors actually leave a referring page at the old location, with a message that the material has been moved and an active onward link to the new location. In addition, there are the cases where entire servers are shut down or where material was published by individuals using a commercial server. Once that individual's account has been terminated, the material is also removed.
The requested URL XYZ was not found on this server."
As an example at Charles Sturt University we are teaching the subject ITC125 "The Information Superhighway" to both our internal and distance education students. The students reference their teaching material via the WWW. As the initial material for this subject was prepared nearly six months ago it is checked prior to the week of presentation. On average it has been found that 10% of the links, which were available at the time of presentation, are not available now.
This need for manual verification takes up substantial amounts of time. It is possible to create a robot, a program which runs in the background, and which checks every night whether the links in the program are still valid, and which links have expired. But is then still the task of the subject author to assess whether the material has been moved and to re-establish the link. Alternatively, if the target document has disappeared the link needs to be removed. Failure to do so would lead to much frustration on the part of the student using the teaching package.
Much of what is happening has to do with a lack of discipline by the authors of web material. As Margaret Henty (1995) has pointed out, the WWW allows very much for vanity publishing to occur. As outlined earlier, is very easy to publish material and so a great many people do just this: publish. The safe guards of the traditional publishing houses, such as quality control, consistency and the like have been lost. The generally anarchic nature of WWW authoring and publishing (cf. Spennemann et al. 1996) facilitates individualism, which is not inherently bad, but also breeds a culture which lacks the discipline to lodge archival copies with the national reference libraries. The ephemeral nature of the publishing medium implies that little tangible evidence survives after the original source has been terminated.
But does this ephemeral nature of the WWW publications matter? Should we not applaud that rather than wasting perfectly good trees on the outpourings of various people we can do so in electronic form? That we can remove material no longer desired without damage to the physical environment?
We believe that this ephemeral nature indeed poses problems, inter alia for the viability of on-line education. Before we spell out these issues, however, let us first look at the two design options for on-line education courses.
An open architecture has the key advantage that additional material can be linked into an existing teaching package if and when it becomes available. While the teaching package provides the guided and structured subject treatment, the external links to readings and examples can be kept up-to-date and allow to respond to newly developing trends in the field. If guided by self-motivated learning is espoused as a teaching concept, then an open architecture allows the user/reader to explore various avenues. The problem, however, is that students will encounter a series of onward links once they have left the teaching package and have moved to a referred document. The danger is that the natural curiosity to explore will take hold and 'pull' a student deeper and deeper into other peoples work and documents, thereby possibly loosing track of the learning outcome intended by the subject author. Further, the time delays incurred by these onward explorations may lead to frustration.
A closed architecture, on the other hand, allows to package the material an traditional distribution media, such as CD-ROM and allows, via password protection, to limit the users to the chosen few, those who have paid a fee, either by purchasing the product or by enrolling in a course. The closed architecture also limits the user to the type and nature of readings and background documents provided. Thus the learning outcomes are more predictable, by the mind of a free ranging an curious student will be stifled.
Teaching packages need to rely on the availability of readings which the subject co-ordinator deems relevant. In the physical world the student is referred to the library which will hold the journal or book referred to, or the article of chapter will be reprinted in a distance education package. In the world of virtual reality instruction the material referred to must be present and cannot be ephemeral. Disappearing links as discussed above are not acceptable at all.
The concept of mirroring can be considered for the problem of disappearing links. If files referenced in a WWW publication could be duplicated at a local server, where the main document resides, then lost links would be a thing of the past. As long as the mirrored files are properly referenced (back to the original author/s) it should not matter where the original information is physically located. This concept is no different to when we reference an article in a paper publication.
One of the problems with mirroring is that is introduces a copyright issue. The moment a document is saved on a server, a copy is made, thereby possibly breaching the conditions of the copyright. This however, can be overcome by negotiation with the copyright owners of the material. An additional mirroring issue is that the original link is no longer accessible. This means that if the original link is updated the corresponding mirrored file is not altered. Balanced against these disadvantages we need to weigh up to what extent current URL links are 'being lost'.
An alternative to mirroring is for all material published on the WWW to be given the equivalent of an ISSN and to be physically stored on a national library server in the country where the material was published. This practice is currently followed for all traditional paper based published material. Such an approach would ensure that a copy of the material is stored everyone concerned would be confident of its continued availability.
The fundamental issue the net community needs to address is whether a 'publication' on the WWW is a publicationsensu strictu as we argue, or whether some sort of ephemera, like a mail drop flier of your local supermarket. The latter would fall under the normal archives provisions, and are usually not kept for prolonged periods of time. Publications, such as newsletters, however, are to be kept and send to the reference libraries.
However, in the physical world one can collect, if so desired, supermarket advertisements and re-use them in a teaching package on marketing and advertising. It is perfectly legitimate to create a boxfile in the library, which contains examples collected from a personal letterbox. Doing so does not incur a copyright fee. One can also reproduce them in a teaching package and pay the resulting copyright fee to a national copyright collection agency.
Having published the material in the first place, and having left physical traces of the material in terms of paper media means that the publisher of the flier cannot undo his or her actions. The resource has become permanent. Keeping these traces is the very essence of archives and libraries. In the virtual reality world, however, any publication is ephemeral and can be taken away by deleting the file of the server. As set out earlier, creating an electronic copy of the file(s) on one's own server breaches the copyright provisions. What happens to the policy statements placed on a governments WWW server when the government changes? Presumably the standard archival conditions will apply as they are/were government documents. But will they remain accessible via links, rather than in the archives? And who has to maintain the links?
The internet community needs to address the moral and ethical issues in this matter. Does the right to publish and the ownership of the published resource by means of copyright entail the right to take away the material as well? If so, then where does this leave academic scholarship? It is easy to envisage the publication of material and data, which, once they have become repeatedly quoted, are removed from the server, thus making any verification impossible.
Obviously there is the need for some caution on behalf of the subject author, who should use what he or she deems to be 'reputable' publishers. While we can safely expect that the subject authors would only refer to academically and scholarly reputable material, this definition should also be extended to the ethics of publishing. It makes little sense to quote material which is likely to vanish in the near future. The subject authors have the responsibility to ensure that they material they present and refer to is likely to 'survive' for at least the duration of the teaching term, preferably longer than that.
There is the need to establish a national library server system ot at the very least a pool of reference libraries or depository archives where the key references are kept. Since much of academia and tertiary education provision is subject to the same pressures to publish and to provide verifiable publications it may be desirable to establish a unified national tertiary educational library.
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