VOLUME 13, NUMBER 3, 1999

Editorial
Charles Wedemeyer, In Memoriam
Michael G. Moore

Articles (for abstracts, click here)
An Argument for the Application of Copyright Law to Distance Education
Tomas A. Lipinski

Factors Influencing Interaction in an Online Course
Charalambos Vrasidas and Marina Stock McIsaac

Perceptions and Effects of Image Transmissions during Internet-Based Training
Robert A. Wisher and Christina K. Curnow

Telemedicine for Patient Education
David L. Byers, Cheryl Hilgenberg and Dent M. Rhodes

Grass Roots
The Great Conversation at a Distance: Using Journals in an Anthropology Telecourse
Joan M. Whitworth

Interview
Speaking Personally with Dr. Richard S. Jarvis
Rick Shearer

Book Review
The Emergence of eBooks: netLibrary
by Reginald F. Melton
Russell Poulin

EDITORIAL
Charles Wedemeyer, In Memoriam 1911-1999
Michael G. Moore

Professor Charles Wedemeyer died on August 1, 1999. I am sure future scholars will provide many well-researched assessments of this great man's life and work, but here I wish to mark his passing by sharing the comments I made about him at the Third Conference on Distance Education at the University of Madison, Wisconsin on August 3, 1987. The occasion was the first presentation of the Wedemeyer Award. Each year since then, the award has been given to a person deemed to have made an outstanding contribution to the scholarship or practice of distance education. The following remarks are a version of what I said:

Charles Wedemeyer: scholar, author, teacher, administrator, internationalist, philosopher, and creator of the ideas of open education and distance education. For four decades a passionate advocate of applying technology as a tool for opening opportunity and promoting democracy in education, Charles Wedemeyer was an ardent activist for freedom to learn, and for access to education regardless of age, race, gender, nationality, physical disability, income, social class, employment, or place of residence. He was not only an intellectual giant, but also a builder; a man who engineered a new educational system that would give opportunity to those whose only chance to learn was "at the back door." "Learning at the Back Door" (1981) was, as most of you know, the title he gave the book in which he surveyed some of the sources of his inspiration-at least the literary sources-interestingly and notably featuring the writings of the English social reformer and novelist, Charles Dickens. Perhaps what fewer of you know is that this title reflected the image in the little picture Wedemeyer posted on the wall of any office he occupied. The picture showed a pre-Revolution, Russian, peasant boy, standing in his ragged clothes and peering through a schoolroom door at the privileged youths inside, contemporaries who had entered learning through the "front door." Wedemeyer was driven by the idea that there had to be ways of providing opportunity for the boy at the back door and for all the other underprivileged people represented by the boy in that picture.

Charles Wedemeyer: The Visionary and Pioneer. This was a man who, in the 1950s and 60s, recognized the wide gap between the published ideals of adult and extension education and the realities of what was delivered-or indeed could be delivered-and first helped us to see how technology might bridge that gap. Not technology for the benefit of technologists or used to control or inhibit learners, but technology as a tool applied in response to human need, aimed at individual self-actualization, aimed at community development, national progress, and international understanding. Charles Wedemeyer was a native of Wisconsin and a graduate of its premier university. Though a student of the liberal arts, particularly English, he became intrigued by technology while serving as a naval officer in World War II. It was under the pressure of war that he first began to consider how communications technologies might be applied in adult education-at that time to train hundreds of thousands of sailors serving on ships and stations around the world. Applying his wartime insights and discoveries to his post-war position as Director of the University of Wisconsin's correspondence study program, Wedemeyer brought this university to a preeminent position among correspondence divisions, especially through associating the university with the work of the U.S. Armed Forces Institute (U.S.A.F.I.), the largest distance teaching organization in the world, with nearly half a million students.

More significantly, by devising and supervising the experiments, innovations, and conceptualizations generically referred to as the Articulated Instructional Media (AIM) Project (1969), Wedemeyer demonstrated the practicality of an approach to educational delivery that was eventually to break the ancient mold of extension, adult, and higher education, and fashion a new prototype. To do this he brought a galaxy of pioneer thinkers about technology for extension education to Madison in the 1960s. From their discussions came the Brandenberg reports-two slim volumes that laid the foundation of research and theory for what we now describe as distance education. The names of two of its contributors give a hint of events to follow. Professor Börje Holmberg was to become Director of Research at the FernUniversität, West Germany's first distance teaching university, and also the most prolific early researcher of distance education. In retrospect, even more significant was the presence of Britain's Professor Harold Wiltshire, who was to organize the first correspondence television course in Britain in collaboration with Walter James, another lifelong friend of Wedemeyer. Wiltshire took what he learned in Madison to the Planning Commission that was to propose setting up the British Open University; after the Open University was established, James became its first Dean of Education. Thus, at first indirectly-though later more directly-Wedemeyer influenced the concept and form of the Open University, and of higher education throughout the world.

From nearer home came thinkers and teachers of such stature as Margaret Monroe, Gayle Childs, Homer Kempfer, and U.S.A.F.I.'s Ripley Sims. The Brandenberg Seminars that I have focused on here were just one part of the Articulated Media Project-the experimental prototype for distance education worldwide as we know it today and certainly one of the most important programs of experimentation in education ever conducted in this great university. In the AIM Project, Wedemeyer demonstrated the feasibility of meeting adult learning needs through a new kind of educational system-a total system that integrated ("articulated") electronic media, especially television, radio, telephone conferencing, computer, programmed instruction, slides and tapes, and home laboratory kits, with the old, especially correspondence teaching. With AIM, Wedemeyer took us past merely conjecturing about the idea of a systems-based, integrated, multi-media distance education and made it a reality.

Through his tenure at the University of Oxford and his friendships with Wiltshire, Walter Perry, first Vice Chancellor of the Open University, and its first Secretary, Chris Christodoulou, Wedemeyer's ideas, as expressed in Brandenberg and tested in AIM, were taken up in Great Britain and gave shape to the Open University, Britain's greatest contribution to the world of education. Subsequently, these ideas and practices have swept the world. This is the place, Madison, Wisconsin, where it all began, and this evening we honor the man by establishing an award in his name. Charles Wedemeyer: Friend of Education Beyond the University. In this role he acted as consultant to the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the National Institute of Education; leader of the correspondence study divisions of the National University Extension Association; collaborator with trainers in business and a staunch defender of the Proprietary Schools. In all these areas his ideas were unfashionably ahead of the times and usually overlooked by traditional academics more ready to condemn than to consider.

Charles Wedemeyer: Internationalist. He addressed the initial five nations present at the 1957 meeting of the International Council for Correspondence Education (ICCE), and the more than 150 nations who attended the 1982 council, as well as those present at each International Council for Distance Education (ICDE) conference in between. He brought honor to his country when elected President of the International Council and served from 1968 to 1972. As consultant to scores of countries before the time of easy mass air travel, from Venezuela in the west to Indonesia in the east, he was called upon and he was listened to. Whole national systems of education were changed, and the development of whole nations was influenced.

Charles Wedemeyer: University of Wisconsin William Lighty Professor of Education. A professor modestly housed in Lowell Hall writing his not yet popular views and theories, only the more discriminating student sought him out. Wedemeyer's course in distance education in the Department of Continuing and Vocational Education was the first in the world. Sometimes there were three or four students; years later there were twenty or thirty. This year at Penn State alone, a course like his attracted thirty-nine students. Courses are offered in Canada, Germany, England, and in Australia where there is an M.A. in Distance Education taught at a distance. However, the teaching of distance education began with this man. Charles Wedemeyer: Scholar. He was the author of more than 140 publications, spanning fifty years of scholarship. I was fortunate to be associated with him during his years of synthesis-the early 1970s when practice and experiments were examined in an effort to hammer out a theory and a discipline of distance education. "Just break the ground," Wedemeyer said, "others will come behind and do the tidying-up." Starting with his landmark set of definitions in the 1971 Encyclopedia of Education, we broke the ground. The tidying-up continues.

I wish I could say more-about the Wisconsin Open School; about the first use of educational satellites in the Educational Satellite Project (EDSAT); about the first tele-conferencing in the Educational Telephone Network (ETN); about how ICCE was brought to UNESCO, and the change of name to ICDE. The telling of these and much more must await another opportunity.

Before closing though, like everyone else who has spoken or written about Wedemeyer, we must find time to speak about Wedemeyer the man. The qualities that resonate through such descriptions include, "warmth," "kindness," "courtesy," "generosity," "humanity," "understanding"-all qualities that manifest themselves best in his dealings with learners. This was a man who was willing to suffer fools gladly. He listened with respect to the fumbling of the most callow beginner, or the banalities of the johnny-come-lately would-be experts. And always he sought to AFFIRM the other person. Wedemeyer had that special paradoxical quality of the highly self-actualized individual who combines great knowledge and wisdom together with both personal humility and fresh readiness-to-learn. To Wedemeyer, the most inexperienced learner was of greatest importance. He attended, he listened and conveyed to you that you were important, not as a repository for his knowledge, but as a source of shared experience and mutual learning. In this way, he led you to be a creator-and then affirmed your creation. It was not important whether your idea was new or if he had heard it a hundred times before; he knew that it was new for you and he showed his enthusiasm and his pleasure at the evidence of your growth. It was a bonus when, out of the profusion of ideas that this man generated, there emerged innovation or new insight. It was his unconditional regard for each person that illuminates the greatness of this man's own work.

In conclusion, I will draw on the words of Walter James, on the occasion of Charles Wedemeyer's award of the Doctorate of the Open University-incidentally, the first foreigner and only American to date to be so honored. Those whom distance education has reached out and touched, said James: "owe more than they know and far more than they can repay to him." The Open University, said James-and here I would add all the more recently established open universities around the world, America's extension departments, the correspondence schools, the armed forces, corporate trainers, and those of us who work in university graduate departments at the University of Wisconsin, Penn State, and elsewhere-we are all, in the words of Walter James: "inheritors of his inspiration, beneficiaries of his advice, and learners from his wisdom."

References
Wedemeyer, C. A., ed. 1966. The Brandenburg memorial essays on correspondence instruction - II. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin, University Extension.

---. 1971. Independent study. In The encyclopedia of education, 4, ed. L. C. Deighton. New York: Macmillan.

---. 1981. Learning at the back door: Reflections on non-traditional learning in the lifespan. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

---. 1982. The birth of the Open University-A postscript. Teaching at a Distance 21: 21-27.

Wedemeyer, C. A., and R. Najem. 1969. AIM: From concept to reality. The articulated instructional media program at Wisconsin. Syracuse, NY: Center for the Study of Liberal Education for Adults.

ABSTRACTS

An Argument for the Application of Copyright Law to Distance Education
Tomas A. Lipinski

This article presents a legal analysis of the application of copyright law to distance education environments, particularly as it applies to Web-based instruction and the construction of electronic reserves, or so-called virtual libraries. The author argues that revision of copyright law to allow for the reproduction, display, and performance of works in these settings is consistent with national policy and existing and developing copyright law. The dangers of moving toward a schema of universal or compulsory licensing of information products and services are also explored. Finally, the author suggests several possible components that new legislation or "fair use" guidelines might include.

Factors Influencing Interaction in an Online Course
Charalambos Vrasidas and Marina Stock McIsaac

This study examines the nature of interaction in an online course from both teacher and student perspectives. Major components of a conceptual framework to identify interaction were identified. Data analysis suggested that the structure of the course, class size, feedback, and prior experience with computer-mediated communication all influenced interaction. Results of the study reconceptualize interaction as a theoretical construct and emphasize the importance of socially constructed meanings from the participants' perspectives.

Perceptions and Effects of Image Transmissions during Internet-Based Training
Robert A. Wisher and Christina K. Curnow

This article reports on a study that examined the influence of a student's visual access to the instructor during Internet-based audiographics training. A four-day factual course on information operations was taught through lecture and slides over the Internet to n = 110 students situated at seven remote sites. The availability of instructor video was manipulated. For two instructional modules, the transmission of the instructor video was disabled for half of the students while the other half could view the instructor; this procedure was reversed for two other modules. The results showed that increasing the video capability of an Internet-based course does not necessarily improve the learning of factual information.

Telemedicine for Patient Education
David L. Byers, Jr., Cheryl Hilgenberg, and Dent M. Rhodes

A telemedicine project was conducted to explore the delivery of childbirth preparation classes originating at a large regional hospital to a remote site at a small rural hospital. Over six months, three series of classes were included in the project, with twenty-four participants at the originating site and twenty participants at the remote site. A two-way, audio/video teleconferencing system with multiple cameras and monitors was employed for instruction. A registered nurse taught the class and a site facilitator assisted at the remote site. Evaluation of the project was done through surveys, interviews, and observations. The classes were well received by project participants at both sites. Principal advantages cited were increased availability of the programs, improved attendance, and convenience to rural participants. The principal disadvantages cited focused on technical problems, particularly audio quality.

The Great Conversation at a Distance: Using Journals in an Anthropology Telecourse
Nancy P. McKee

A substantial number of university faculty who teach at a distance express distress at the loss of the face-to-face contact they consider to be the hallmark of the "great conversation" that is the essence of higher education. With respect to student-teacher contact, this paper explores the idea that student journals might make many of the same benefits offered to on-campus students available to distance students.

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