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** NISS Advisor ** Contents * Quality Assessment Reports
==================== * Last telnet calls to NISS
Issue 132 * In the mood for nostalgia ?
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14th December 1998
====================================== Information about NISS Services ==
** Quality Assessment Reports
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NISS's Education area Editor notes that:
After a lull, there is now a steady increase in the number of Quality
Assessment of Teaching reports available from the site at
http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/hefce/qar/
Sites sometimes ask why a report which they know to be in production is
not yet available on the Web. The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) has
explained that:
"Until reports are published they are not available to the public. For
this reason, reports are not put on the internet or sent to the
newspapers until the published report has been sent to the institution."
** Last telnet calls to NISS
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A final warning ! The end of the year also brings the end of NISS's
telnet interface - if you do still access NISS this way please
investigate the use of an alternative interface (e.g. a graphical web
browser) without delay.
As from January 1999, users will need to access our site via its home
page on the Web at http://www.niss.ac.uk/ or go directly to one of our
many pages. Most people already use these Web access routes - only a
very few telnet calls are still made.
Earlier editions of NISS Advisor (issues 124 and 128) commented on the
rationale behind our decision to close the telnet service. If you have
any remaining questions about this matter please email [log in to unmask]
** In the mood for nostalgia ?
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The early 1990's expansion of interest in the Internet has often been
likened to the first wave of popular enthusiasm for radio in the 1920's.
But more and more now, parallels between the two phenomena are becoming
blurred by a natural reversion to the previous medium - audio. Thanks to
the Web, modern radio listeners equipped with the most basic low-speed modem
and a sound card have access to a variety of Internet broadcasting radio
stations undreamed of by those early amateurs whose garages, outhouses and
barns were filled with the most elaborate combinations of lovingly
hand-crafted receivers, liquid batteries and tangled wires - and all this
unhampered by the vagaries of atmospheric conditions! As other languages
catch up with U.S. English in becoming heavy users of the Web, the educational
potential of Internet radio and TV has suddenly become enormous. Not
restricted to the area of language skills, this potential promises to
revolutionize learning in most areas of the social sciences.
As a very modest beginning, NISS News recognizes that an online news source
need no longer be an online newspaper (an increasingly difficult thing to
define in itself). We have renamed the "Collections of Online Newspapers"
page "Collections of News Sources" (you can access this page via the News
area home page or directly at http://www.niss.ac.uk/news/collections.html),
and have attempted to divide the sources on it roughly by media type. Very
soon such distinctions will become meaningless, as the necessity for
acquiring external plugins to use different media evaporates; we recognize
that this is an interim measure. Right now there is only one directory of
purely audio sources linked to from this page - the MIT list, which though
far from all-inclusive is the best designed, simplest to use, and very big.
Suggestions for any other directory of purely audio resources that users of
NISS would find useful are most welcome, and can be emailed to the News
area Editor at [log in to unmask]
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