Conception
At the August 1997 Conference on Chemical Engineering
at Snowbird, Utah, (sponsored by the American Society
for Engineering Education), one workshop addressed the
problem of delivering training in particle technology
to students at colleges that had no courses in this area
and / or no staff trained in this area.
The group concluded that a Web site could present
and link educational resources that would help faculty
and students learn more about the art and craft of
particle technology. It would also serve as a resource
for industrial practitioners who often have little
training in particle technology. One person
had already built an in-house site with such characteristics
and volunteered to develop proposals and work
up a public demonstration site.
An immediate concern was whether prospective authors
would submit material for presentation on a Web site.
At present most educational materials in particle technology
are distributed in print, videotape, or CDROM form.
The authors are not paid very much for producing them,
and the universities that publish them typically charge only
enough to pay for the production costs, so there is little
financial incentive for producing the materials. People
do it to gain recognition from the technical and academic
communities -- resulting in a higher salary and a higher
probability of having grant proposals funded.
Authors have been been reluctant to place educational papers
on the Web because Web pages are regarded as
-- lacking in editorial oversight and the discipline
of peer-review
-- too personal in tone
-- too often and too easily changed
-- hard to cite
-- not archived, so they are generally impossible to
obtain once the page has been erased from the server.
The original proposal planned to overcome these objections by
-- soliciting contributions in an orderly fashion
designed to cover the entire field with materials from
active practitioners who have a deserved reputation for
teaching the material well
-- putting the contributions through an editorial
and peer review process
-- removing the material from the author's control
once approved for publication
-- ensuring that the Web pages will be posted for
a significant length of time (5 years)
-- publishing a print version of the material, so
that it could be cited by journal name, volume, and page
number.
-- distributing the print version so that it would
be available long into the future. The print version
would be given (free of charge) to the authors, the sponsoring
institutions and to major centers of particle technology,
with the understanding that they would make the printed
version available in their libraries for at least ten years.
These attributes would help people recognize that
publishing an article in ERPT is as significant as
other currently-recognized forms of professional effort
and thus help the authors receive full credit
for the work from their salary review committees,
Management Structure
Sponsorship: In 1998 January the PTF agreed
to sponsor this project.
Management: The chair of the PTF names
the Managing Editor, who facilitates
the flow of articles to the Web site and coordinates the peer review
and editing / formatting to a consistent style.
Officers of the PTF participate in the invitation, review, and
editing processes.
Web Service: For two years after startup in 1999 Jan
the Engineering Research Center for Particle Technology
at the Univ. of Florida in Gainesville provided Internet
service. In 2001 Feb the PTF obtained its own domain name
and moved ERPT to a commercial Internet service provider
Stability of Content: We plan to keep ERPT
tutorials on-line for at least five years after their initial posting.
Tutorials referenced by the ERPT site but posted on other sites
are not under ERPT control and may not remain posted as long.
Scope
An extended listing of the very diverse technical areas
involved in particle technology is presented in the subject
index for ERPT.
We expect eventually to have about ten tutorials
in each of about ten areas of particle technology (about 100 modules).
Each tutorial will be equivalent to 2-3 hours of a course.
About once every five years each article will be updated.
At 18 articles per year, it will take six years to complete
our coverage of the field.
We expect eventually to have about 500 annotated links
to supplementary Web sites that contain
educational material related to particle technology.
The links will be particularly helpful in covering
areas of particle technology for which no ERPT
tutorial has been written.
Server storage space required for
tutorials averaging 1 MB in length (including graphics)
would total 100 MB.
Audience = an average of ten people
each from 200 different locations
(100 universities plus 100 companies) requesting
Server Traffic At an average
of 2 modules per year the audience requests
4,000 module downloads per year. With a 200-day year
daily traffic will be 20 module downloads or 20 MB/day.
At 28.8 kbaud (3,600 chars per sec) this can be transmited
in 1.5 hours or 6% of available time on the server.
Publication Procedure
The PTF advertizes for contributions
within the scope of the publication. The managing editor has
posted a set of guidelines for preparing articles.
A prospective author may submit prospective
tutorials to the managing editor
via computer file, print copy, or by reference to a posting on the Web.
The managing editor may assign the contribution to a reviewer
to evaluate and suggest revisions to
the submission.
The author revises the material
as needed to satisfy the editorial board, signs an
agreement to allow use of the material in ERPT,
and delivers the final files to the managing editor.
The article is published by uploading
to the ERC Web server.
Users (students, faculty, corporate technologists)
are permitted to make a single print copy
of the article for personal use.
Revisions: Modules will be
considered for revision after five years;
revision will be mandatory after ten years.
This policy will help assure up-to-date educational resources.
Startup, Launch, and Growth
A demonstration site was posted for
developmental purposes in March 1998.
Meanwhile the site will post links and publish articles
that satisfy the editorial guidelines.
The intentions of the ASEE workshop group have now been
extended, refined, explored, tested, and (for the most part)
implemented. The final test of value will be whether people
in need of information or help related to particle technology
turn to this site repeatedly and whether authors continue to
develop material and recommend links for ERPT.
As these indicators of growth and value become available,
they will be posted here.
HISTORY OF SITE STATISTICS
| Item | 1999 Sep 01 | 2000 Nov 08 | 2001 Apr 26 |
| # ERPT tutorials | 2 | 3 | 5 |
| # non-ERPT tutorials | 20 | 26 | 25 |
| # other educ links | 0 | 60 | 37 |
| # non-Web materials | 10 | 17 | 11 |
In 2001 February the Particle Technology Forum purchased
a domain name and independent server space to allow ERPT
more flexibility in maintaining the site and more resources
to extend and expand our offerings.
Since the start we linked to several sites hosting video clips
and ERPT posted its first video clips in the 2001 April issue.
By mid-2000 interactive pages were in use on several pages to which
we linked. To date we have not developed interactive capability.
In early 2002 ERPT acquired a computing package in TrueBASIC
that allowed preparing and distributing computer programs
in a compiled form that could be run on almost any personal computer
platform using a free vendor-supplied program (Bronze TrueBASIC).
The first program making use of this capability was posted
with Vol. 3, No. 1.
In 2003 it was apparent that few authors could prepare material
in HTML format but that PDF had become well-established,
so the basic format of tutorials was changed from HTML to PDF,
starting with Vol. 4, No.1.
