Siberian Mouse Studio 36

Siberian Mouse Studio 36

Download File ===== https://fancli.com/2sXLqe

It takes nearly seven hours to drive snow-covered Siberian roads from the university town of Tomsk to Prokopyevsk, a down-at-the-heels mining town of ramshackle wooden houses and Stalin-era apartment buildings with no evident signs of the computer age.But physics students at the Prokopyevsk Distance Learning Center of Tomsk State University, tucked away on the top floor of a local nursing school, can join chat sessions with their professors at Tomsk State, 250 miles away, with a click of a mouse.From Petrozavodsk near Finland to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean and here in western Siberia, Russia is embracing modern distance learning, with all its potential for making education more accessible and with the attendant debates about quality and philosophical implications. It is not quite a revolution yet, but it is a big change, and one of the keys to educational reform in Russia. It is sometimes easier said than done, for it also requires a decent Internet connection, but on a recent chill winter evening with snowbanks lining Prokopyevsk's poorly lit streets, nearly 20 students filled the long, bright computer room. Even if the town's lone Internet provider is having a bad day, they can load CD-ROM's with interactive, multimedia electronic textbooks by Tomsk's leading physics professors - which also allows them to see their professors, even though meager megabytes have thwarted videoconferencing attempts.They can also conduct independent electronic laboratory experiments. One includes a virtual particle accelerator, where they can see how electrical resistance works."I don't have a computer at home", said Ruslan Reshetnikov, an 18-year-old sophomore intently observing the resistance process on screen, "but I spend about three or four hours a day here. I'm in constant communication with my teachers. I can do computer experiments and see how things really work".Several workstations up from Ruslan, Artyom Shuvayev, a freshman, also plans to be a physicist, but today he has spent several hours working with a multimedia textbook on Russian history. On his screen is a description of the mid-19th-century judicial reform carried out in czarist Russia.Artyom was in Tomsk recently on a field trip with his classmates, meant to instill school spirit. After two years studying in Prokopyevsk, physics students transfer to the main campus in Tomsk, graduating after an additional three years."Here I will have time to grow up for two years", said the studious, strapping Artyom, who is already mapping out his future. "They say those who go to Tomsk from far away don't have time to study".All of this is good news for Prokopyevsk, where unemployment is over 20 percent, and the population of nearly 300,000 has too few distractions and too many problems. Ten years ago the town was a hotbed of demonstrations that helped bring down Communism. Famous for the best coal in the Kuzbass, as the region is called, Prokopyevsk has made the news more in recent years for methane explosions at its failing mines and strikes by irate workers who have blockaded local junctions of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Dozens of teenage boys in the area have been disabled and even died from electric shocks after attempting to steal power lines or transformers to sell as scrap metal.Like Ruslan and Artyom, most of the 530 students studying physics, law, history and economics at the Prokopyevsk program are the children of miners or blue-collar workers. It costs about $280 a year to study in Prokopyevsk, cheaper than going straight to Tomsk, the oldest classical university in Siberia, where scholarship spots are highly competitive and living and travel expenses add up. "They will mostly be first-generation intelligentsia", said Dmitry Voronin, the rector of the affiliate. Mr. Voronin, who keeps a samovar and a lemon tree in his office, is a great believer in computer technology in education, although he admits his knowledge does not extend much beyond e-mail. "There must still be live teaching, but the Internet broadens horizons infinitely", he said, adding that students, after showing initial interest in international marriage services on the Web, are now more likely to look up sites related to physics. Aleksandr Tikhonov is a former minister of education who is charged with promoting distance learning and high technology in education. "There are 300,000 students studying by distance learning in Russia right now, by Internet and television", he said. "Five years ago there were no more than 10,000. In two or three years it will be close to one million"."Distance learning is more important than for Belgium, say, or the U.S. because we have no roads" he added. "I had to get from Ufa to Yekaterinburg quickly. They are close, but it was winter. I had to fly through Novosibirsk", a detour of nearly 1,300 miles.Today's technology-driven programs encompass everything from grade school to business school. Some curricula are home-grown, while others use courses produced jointly with universities like Stanford and Oxford. Last month, Teleshkola, the first full-scale distance learning channel for schoolchildren, made its debut on NTV+, a satellite channel. Hundreds of the best teachers in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod auditioned for the project, which is backed by the Education Ministry. While this is a pay channel, part of the concept is to help provide a high level of teaching to invalid children, refugees and children in rural areas where some schools may soon be shut for economic reasons. Technology is also helping restore academic ties to countries that were part of the former Soviet Union, especially to ethnic Russians living there. Tomsk State, which has a distance learning center in Kazakhstan, is also working with the Kazakh government to create a cross-border distance learning university. Tomsk State's Institute of Distance Learning is a beehive of activity, even on weekends. Electronic textbooks are created with the help of psychologists and Web designers. Lyudmila Borilo, a chemistry professor leading her first distance learning course, with students in Kazakhstan, spent five months writing the course in longhand, learning as she went along to adapt it to the electronic medium."Here I go from the general to the specific", she said. "When I read lectures it's not like this. I don't have an introduction. When I give a lecture, and I talk about radiation, I don't have time to diverge to ecology and other subjects".But so many types of programs across Russia have been dubbed distance learning - even basic correspondence courses that existed in Soviet times - and so many terms are bandied about that the Ministry of Education is sponsoring a conference to define the concept and put together a glossary of terms.Beyond confusion over what the terms mean, there are other problems to overcome. Teachers working for affiliates of Moscow-based institutes fall outside the bounds of labor laws. And while young men studying on campus at accredited institutions get an automatic draft deferment, 18-year-old male distance learning students are given deferments only if administrators fudge their status.But progress is being made. The Education Ministry plans to invest more than $140 million next year to computerize schools, improve telecommunications and create electronic textbooks, double this year's budget. Money from the European Union, World Bank and various foundations has also helped. Stanford has sponsored a course ininternational relations with two universities, Yaroslavl State northeast of Moscow and Southern Urals State in Chelyabinsk. A recent trancontinental chat session included discussions of fascism, NATO and Southeast Asian geopolitics.Lectures are shown on videotape, and Stanford coordinators admit they were surprised by Russian technological prowess. Lectures were filmed at Stanford on Beta tapes that needed to be digitized. Stanford did not have the equipment to do that, but the Russian universities did."We thought we would be of assistance to them", said Aleksei Sitnikov, a coordinator at Stanford. "When we went through the regions, we understood that they are ready for partnership. They have technological capability we don't have".ANOTHER notable Russian achievement is the Modern University for the Humanities, founded in 1992. It promotes distance learning by satellite television, which it believes has better prospects for Russia than the Internet. Inside its Moscow headquarters, an unimposing brick building that once housed a radio engineering school, television and editing studios on the top floor rival those of a television network. Professors tape lectures on everything from Greek philosophy to physics. The lectures are transmitted to the university's "teleport" and beamed from a rooftop satellite dish to students across Russia, former Soviet republics and Israel via eight rented channels on the American LMI 1 satellite. The university has applied for American accreditation.Local tutors at the university's regional centers work with students on the spot. But even the 5,000 students on the Moscow campus - the university has a total of 110,000 - watch the lectures on screen.Pyotr Karpenko, a former professor of adult education who is rector of the Modern University, speaks of education technology with the passion of a preacher."In the last 300 years, the technology of teaching hasn't changed", he said. "Now it is changing before our eyes. It is impossible to imagine the classroom method of teaching in 10 or 20 years. It will be an anachronism - like when printing came, it became an anachronism to write on parchment".Even the Modern University, though, has its technical shortcomings. The Kemerovo branch, about a three-hour drive from Tomsk, on the way to Prokopyevsk, has not put up its teleport yet. Lectures are shown on video, but the center has only two televisions.But the rector of the affiliate, Viktor Mandzilevsky, speaks of educational innovation and adapting it to society's needs with the same fire as Professor Karpenko. "Distance education is the first education structure which answers to the market", he said. "Russia needs this".Professor Karpenko's ultimate dream is to make education completely portable. He loves the idea of satellite phones, which can go anywhere, anytime. Fyodor Konyukhov, an adventurer and a round-the-world sailboat racer, is enrolled in the university and communicates with it through the Internet.Others worry about the loss of live human contact."Education is like theater", said Robin Matthews, a professor of business who runs the distance learning M.B.A. program of Kingston University, a British institution, with the Moscow Academy of National Economy. "There must be interaction. It can't be completely disembodied".Like Tomsk State's program with Prokopyevsk, Kingston University combines live teaching with Internet chats and e-mail consultations. It also uses videoconferencing.VLADIMIR Dyomkin, the director of Tomsk State's Institute of Distance Learning, can speak for hours about the possibilities of distance learning, but he ends with the tortured musings of a Russian intellectual."We never said education can be purely at a distance", he said. "There can be some teaching from a distance. Knowledge can be transferred this way, through the Internet. But what about the formation of the individual? There can't be development if they just sit in front of a television screen. Then there's no spiritual link. They can't just have indirect communications with their teachers. They have to see their mimicry, their gestures". 2b1af7f3a8