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Scholarship Online A key challenge for academics today is to take advantage of the exceptional possibilities that are offered by new information technologies -- opportunities for broadening students' learning experiences and for creatively rethinking traditional approaches to instruction. The broad accessibility of powerful tools for publishing, archiving and accessing information arguably makes this period the most dramatic for scholarship since the contemporary university's medieval beginnings. It has been estimated that more books were printed within 50 years after the printing press was invented than had been produced throughout all of Europe during the previous 1,000 years. The digital revolution promises to usher in an even more striking information explosion, with a vastly richer array of materials for learning than we've ever known. Investing in Knowledge There is now broad awareness that recent technological advances hold striking promise for teaching and learning. We see an advantage to not only the online dissemination of course syllabuses and class notes but also primary text material as well. Thus, whereas most publishers center their production on hard copy, and sometimes make Web-based materials available as supplements, our approach is the reverse -- to use the Internet as our primary vehicle, with hard copy being used to enhance online resources. Digital Text Plus is operated by scholars who are dedicated to producing for the academic community the best quality instructional resources that we can create. At the same time, we are working to share the results of our own experiences as freely and broadly as we can, with initiatives that hopefully contribute to the stream of developments that we know as today's information revolution. These different avenues for communication all have a useful place, as we see it, in helping us engage the challenge of the new.
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