Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/62210
or MERLOT, a resource of teach- ing materials and ideas for college and university educators. Visitors to the site can become MERLOT user members at no charge. After registration, they then have access to educational materials in seven major categories, including the arts, education, humanities, mathematics, science and technolo- gy, social sciences, and business. MERLOT's database for business alone includes 1,400 class plans and other materials in ten business areas, including accounting, economics, finance, management, information systems, marketing, international business, e-commerce, business law, and general. Educators worldwide can nominate materials of their own or of a colleague and then provide a link to those materials online. More than 300 people volunteer their expertise to MERLOT to eval- uate and approve assignments and other support materials available on the site. Those materials are then peer reviewed. Once materials receive a positive review and the author has given permission, the peer review is posted to MERLOT. Cathy Owens Swift is a professor that even though some materials have been poorly rated during the peer review, they may be useful to others, perhaps at the high school level, so materials are rarely taken off the site. Currently, individual schools or says Swift. "If we find one with a lower rating on the site, quite often the authors themselves pull it, so it maintains the site's integrity." However, she adds, authors of poorly rated materials often work to improve them. Additionally, she has found university systems can sign up to be campus or system partners to MER- LOT, to provide funds, in-kind con- tributions, and other support to the endeavor. To sustain MERLOT over the long term, says Swift, "We need to have contributions to MERLOT NEWSBYTES ■ YAHOO GOES TO BANGALORE Yahoo Inc. has established a center for research and development in Bangalore, India, the first of the com- pany's research centers outside the United States. The center, which will employ 150 engineers by the end of 2004, is part of Yahoo's global strate- gy to create data mining, e-com- merce, network, and search engine technologies that are more applicable in the international market. of marketing at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro and an editor with MERLOT's business edi torial board. "Generally, the site doesn't have modules with lower rat- ings that are peer reviewed because we're triaging them ahead of time," ■ LAPTOPS GAINING GROUND As a reflection of computer users' nomadic tendencies, sales of laptop computers have topped sales of the tried-and-true desktop in the U.S., according to Computerworld. Sales of laptops now make up 54 percent of computer retail sales, compared to 25 percent in 2000. In related news, flat-screen monitors are now outselling larger CRT monitors for the first time as well, capturing 52 per- cent of sales versus 22 percent in May of 2002. Decreasing prices are one reason for the figures, say analysts. ■ .EU COMING SOON The European Union wants to add the ".eu" designation to the Internet's existing top-level domains, such as ".com" or ".org," reports EUbusiness.com. According to a statement, the EU hopes that .eu will "become the distinctive pan- European identification of Web sites and e-mail addresses, comparable to .org or .com." ■ z BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2003 53 recognized as a service to the disci- pline. We are also looking at other organizational partners who can pro- vide support for MERLOT." Swift emphasizes that the site not only provides an invaluable resource of teaching ideas and materials for educators, but it also gives educa- tors a reason to improve their work. Educators who receive five-star rat- ings on the site also can create port- folios of their work that can be used in their reviews at their schools. "MERLOT supports the scholarship of teaching and elevates it to the next level," she says. For more information about MERLOT, visit www.merlot.org or e-mail Swift at GSwift@ GaSoU.edu.