• Sherry, L., & Morse, R. (1995). An assessment of training needs in the use of distance education for instruction. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, 1 (1), 5-22.
  Reprinted in Educational Technology Review. (1996, Winter.) 5, 10-17. (with Richard Morse as co-author/editor)
• Sherry, L. (1995). Issues in Distance Learning. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, 1 (4), 337-365. (with Karen Myers as peer reviewer)
• Sherry, L., & Trigg, M. (1996). Epistemic Forms and Epistemic Games. Educational Technology, 36(3), 38-44. (I served as peer reviewer to Maggie Trigg for her training product; I then wrote this paper based on her training product)

E-mail consultation/mentoring, locally and globally

Any professor can be considered a teacher/mentor 24 hours a day, not just within the bounds of the classroom. Though not considered formal presentation, lecture/demonstration, or teaching per se, informal mentoring is a crucial part of any educator's job. Here at UCD, we have the good fortune to have two means of communicating online with students-CINS accounts (Ouray and Carbon) and CEO/Togethernet. Considering that our learning community is mobile, has job and family commitments, and spends limited time on campus, online mentoring is becoming increasingly critical. I spend a lot of time engaging in this type of activity.

In particular, I carried out a lot of electronic discussion with members of the Home Page Development Team and had Karen Myers save the e-mail correspondence so we could use it for a developmental research project after the Home Page was operational.

I have mentored about a dozen graduate students at UCD in various topics including UNIX, Netscape, HTML authoring, message design for hypermedia documents, research ideas, and the like. I have always written down my e-mail address each time I have given a lecture/demonstration or inservice session of any sort, and told students that I am available 24 hours a day to answer their questions or give them advice.

I keep all of my journal articles, including those in-review and in-press, online. I have also received many comments and requests for guidance from members of the global community who have read them, and have responded to each one of them.

Because I was keeping the School of Education home page in my own account, I was limited in the amount of e-mail messages I could store. However, I have printed out a few representative replies from students and peers with whom I have had fruitful online discussions concerning problems of mutual interest. (These are included in my paper portfolio.)

E-mail consultation/mentoring, locally and globally

In addition to mentoring UCD graduate students in various technology topics, I've also summarized missed class sessions for them, done formative evaluations of their work, and found research citations for students and professors alike. I've included a few sample postings from UCD people in my paper portfolio.

I have also carried on some interesting e-mail correspondence with other researchers and students in the global learning community. For example, from AERA VIRTCON III, one AERA member suggested that I look up a citation on metacognition, and was willing to share his own research with me. Steve Alessi, too, downloaded the paper Karen Myers and I wrote, Developmental Research on Collaborative Design. I asked him to critique it, and he did. I have included his critique in my paper portfolio.

Dr. Badrul Khan at the University of Texas, Brownsville, asked one of his students (Edna Atkinson) to submit some class work based on the chapter for Dr. Khan's book that Brent Wilson and I wrote. Edna had to submit her products to Brent and me, and we had to review them and send her our critique online. This correspondence is also included in my paper portfolio.

Online Forums

In the fall of 1997, I also participated in two online forums on Web-Based Instruction. I was an "invited guest speaker" on the Northern Illinois University's distance education forum. I was also interviewed for Joni Dunlap's interactive seminar, Instructional Strategies and Delivery Issues of Web-Based Instruction , and answered several questions posed by students.

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