"Technology for 21st Century Teaching," offered by Cornell's Office of Distance Learning, will be held Friday, April 3, beginning at 8 p.m. in Room 105 ILR Conference Center, Garden Avenue. There is no registration fee.

The session is designed to familiarize the entire community with state-of-the-art technologies currently available for enhancing education at a distance. There will be six simultaneous demonstrations at various locations within the building:

Michael Hertzog of Microsoft will demonstrate one of its newest products, NetShow. The Cornell Medical College will use NetShow to video-stream grand rounds to doctors in 20 affiliated hospitals.

• Natalie Cunningham of University OnLine will demonstrate an entire line of services, including course authoring tools, a library of online courses and administrative services.
• Ed Saff, the developer of NetTutor and NetGroup, will demonstrate an electronic white board facility for web-based collaborative mathematical and scientific communication.
• Sharon Sledge of Cornell's Academic Technology Services will introduce and answer questions about CBT, an extensive library of computer-based training courses available to the Cornell community.
• Sean P. Murphy will present FirstClass from SoftArc. FirstClass is used to provide two-way communication between students and faculty and web-based group collaboration.
• Jill Amorelli from PictureTel will present demonstrations of video teleconferencing and show how it can bring guest speakers into the classroom and the classroom to distant students.

The event features a continental breakfast and a brief overview of the technologies being demonstrated. There will be four consecutive sessions, and most of the presentations will be repeated at each of the four sessions, allowing time for one-on-one questioning of the presenters between sessions.

The Office of Distance Learning invites all those interested in distance learning to attend this event.