Botany online - The Internet Hypertextbook is our approach to contribute to Internet Teaching. We admit that we are not the only ones to follow the path exploiting all possiblities being offered by the modern technologies of Internet publishing.
While surfing in the Internet we found a large number of projects elaborated and promoted by our collegues all with the same goals - presenting scientific knowledge to students - but using different approaches of teaching techniques according to personal intentions, differnt educational levels and local university requirements as well as covering different approaches to Botany and related topics. Since information units in the Internet are easily accessible, extensive use is made by setting links to related teaching projects and data bases. Therefeore "Botany online - The Internet Hypertextbook" as our open-source initiative will inevidently develop in the direction of somewhat like an universal educational network with the operational designation "Science online - The Internet Hypertextbook". The most remarkable fact is that copyright problems may be solved in mutual agreement by requesting permission from the www-author himself, honouring her or his creations and ideas. Authors will retain their rights without limitation and without interference to the development and the forthcoming progress of their own www-projects. Indeed, both, users and authors profit from the interconnections between projects and ideas presented in the Internet. Disclaimers and copyright statements thus sound remarkably similar in all instances we have chequed, so that it is just sufficient to cite one of them as an example. We felt that the purpose formulated on the Biological Web Server, California State University matches our intentions quite well
"The purpose of this server is to consolidate existing WWW Biological Science teaching and research resources and to create and distribute original multimedia resources for the teaching of biology. If you have any materials you would like to contribute, e.g. favorite lectures, photos, 35 mm slides, sounds or movies, please send me an email message describing their contents prior to sending them. This will minimize duplications. All materials must be available for non-commercial, educational purposes but you can copyright them to prohibit commercial use. Sources of materials will be acknowledged and you may include your own short statement of use restrictions. For more information on the usage of Internet materials see the document Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure.
I would also like to provide links to other relevant biological sciences teaching and research materials on the web. If you have a home page or favorite URL please submit them to me. I welcome suggestions as to what subdisciplines they should be listed under. Otherwise don't complain if you don't like where your URL is placed!"
We too, agree upon the declaration about the usage of Internet material as elaborated by the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights: The Conference on Fair Use brings together copyright owner and user interests to discuss fair use issues and, if possible, to develop guidelines for uses of copyrighted works by librarians and educators.
Copyright questions in connection with educational demands have been discussed in a number of working groups - For our purposes we adopt the guidelines issued by the MIT
Acknowledging the rules mentioned above we approach collegues and invite them to participate in our endevour. For the Hypertextbook quite different information units are required. We have not only demand for illustrations and Java-applications of educational value, but also for articles ("essays" or "features" - text and illustrations - in size comparable to a scientific paper). We therefore approach www-authors and ask for permission to include their contribution in "our" Hypertextbook. The contributions will not be altered (although we may ask authors to reduce the number of files or the KB-size of illustrations). We also are interested in integrating full teaching projects. In all cases updates will be possible when necessary. For the time being the URL of "Botany online - The Internet Hypertextbook" is located on the Server of the University of Hamburg (http://www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/biologie/b_online/). A few mirror sites exist on servers of German universities. In regular intervals we compile Download-versions that can be retrived as an FTP-file. We encourage collegues to use our contribution as a source to improve their own educational projects being published on their servers. We appreciate comments and constructive improvments. We have to admit, however that our time is as short as our financial resources are. We do not receive public funds. The Internet Hypertextbook is no completeness achieving data base, it will be under construction forever.
The development of this and other Internet projects will proceed along the lines we as biologists know from the evolution of life. We recognize similarities with the rules of thermodynamics (Internet projects frequently vanish), selection (some projects never are linked to others), mutations (details in projects are corrected by the authors), growth (as everybody knows !), differentiation (similar topics are treated different by authors and universities), hypercycles (regulated growth - a single person cannot manage all problems, being faced with. Like proteins and nucleic acids being essential for life, specialists in different fields combine their efforts, all - contributers and users - become winners)..... Isn't that marvelous ?
This year we have produced a CD exclusively and free of charge for the members of the XVIth International Botanical Congress. We invite a number of collegues to contribute to this project, so that the experts in the field will obtain a CD of maximal use to them, when returning home from St. Louis. In Germany "Botanik online" (our German version) is one of the projects of an educational CD, having been introduced already in schools and universities as low-budget teaching source. Its title at present is "Biologie 98", the 1999 version "Biologie 99" will be issued early in September this year. This CD will not be restricted to German contributions. Our English version has already been interconnected with the German version by an Internet Hypertext Dictionary. We welcome undergraduate teaching projects from english-speaking countries, since we realize that these projects may be an ideal source for German teachers to convert the contents into German teaching units that are in accordance with the official learning guidelines. last not least we offer "Botany online / Botanik online" as a source to be translated into other languages. Who is interested in translations into Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese....?
Teaching goes Internet ..... Do you follow ?