Jocelyn Paine, who together with Graham Stark at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has put together the very popular and useful web applications Be Your Own Chancellor and Budget 97, explains how it was done, linking up with the existing IFS program Taxben. Jane Williams and some of her colleagues at the University of Bristol tells us about the NetQuest project which enables the delivery of multiple choice (and other) questions over the Web. Both these teams will be presenting demonstrations of their work at the CALECO 97 conference in Bristol in September, and I hope you can come along so that you can see them in operation at first hand. The NetQuest team have just about perfected the technical side of things, but are urgently seeking suitable economics questions to be used with the system. Please contact us if you have a bank of such questions which you would like to set up using NetQuest.
Continuing the Web applications theme, Mike Orszag shows how the admissions system for students taking economics and finance courses at Birkbeck college has been considerably improved by putting most of it on the Web for students to access on-line. This looks like something we should all take a look at.
There is also a very neat and efficient technique for low cost, quick development CAL authoring described in the short paper by Richard Taylor.
With a full set of conference and workshop reports and reviews of a number of new software and CD-ROM resources, I hope you will find this to be another interesting issue of CHEER.
We will also move to a somewhat more formal and rigorous process of refereeing the papers which we publish in CHEER. As a consequence, submission dates for CHEER will be a little earlier than has been the case until now (see below). However I want to allay fears that CHEER will become too technical and lose it's more immediate and readable items. We will still include a Reports section, Software Reviews, and, in addition, I want to expand the (screened but unrefereed) Short Notes section where people can tell us briefly about the ways in which they are using technology in their teaching, or air ideas on which they would like to get some feedback. So, please, why not write up your Paper or Short Note now, in time for the next issue of CHEER?
Date of Publication: April 1998 Submission Date: December 1997Volume 12 Issue 2
Date of Publication: September 1998 Submission Date: May 1998All submissions should be in a well recognised electronic format (preferably Word or Word Perfect files with graphics files in .gif format). They can be sent on disk to my address here at Portsmouth or as e-mail file attachments to guy.judge@port.ac.uk. Contact me by e-mail first if you are unsure whether the format you wish to use will be acceptable.