2. Guest Editorial by Anton Ljutic


I have recently rediscovered an old note from my student days which reads:

Anton,
My room is open if you want to have a party there. - L.

This being a family newsletter, I will not go into what followed that note. I am mentioning it merely because, by happy coincidence, the note was written on the back of a leaflet advertising the Shaw Festival. At the center of the leaflet, there appears the following quotation from Shaw's CANDIDA:

We have no more right to consume happiness
without producing it
than to consume wealth without producing it.

The note made me realize that it is that time again when I must piece together another issue of GN if I am to justify my existence (as well as the existence of the newsletter). It is going to be an easier than usual effort for two reasons. One is that I have in reserve a number of excellent contributions. Another is that up here, in Canada, the winter is still going strong, there is a lot of snow on the ground and there are few places where I would rather be on a cold evening than in my study.

Over a year ago I was forwarded an article with the suggestion that it be published. Alas, I must admit that I neglected it at the bottom of my c:\glosas\gn\active\art. A recent rereading gave me the impetus to contact its author, Dr. Stan Kulikowski II, a member of GLOSAS, and request the privilege of sharing it with the public. Permission granted, I scanned my file directories for some introductory background information and was fortunate to find the following missive from Stan. Still bearing the incriminating date, here are Stan's introductory remarks to his article "Teaching on the LAN":

jan 29, 1992

i have promised several people to publish a document on the nets which i wrote a few months ago. only 408 lines in length, but i felt perhaps a little introduction might be helpful to those of you who just wander into it.

'TEACHING on THE LAN' ... briefly describes some of the utilities which instructors use in courses conducted on networks. it begins with simple email use between teachers and students but gets into such topics as automatic assignment grading and evaluations of instructional design. some of you may find some of these areas self-evident, but you might be surprised that i encounter many teachers who think that stand-alone computing is all there is to instructional technology. i wrote this document to specify what kind of instructional utilities we should be working toward in a new 'computer room' recently constructed in our college of education.

floppy disks are an excellent medium for the storage of electronic data. but as a medium of data transfer, diskettes have all the same disadvantages as hardcopy. stand-alone microcomputing does very little to enhance what we do when we teach. if left at stand-alone, educational computing will do little more than be a secondary supporting medium for teachers, collecting dust most of the day like film projectors; or a special curriculum topic carried on for a few periods in the 'computer room', like music in the 'music room'.

in networks, the end user interacts with information that is not tied physical matter. the physical drives are there, but only the network personnel deal with them directly. the users directly work with data as nonphysical objects (in 'virtual machines'), and the volume of data quickly reaches levels which would never be attempted if it were tied to matter. this is where we will find the new tools for teaching. handling text by the megabyte is a different affair than how we fumble with a few hundred kilobytes.

well, TEACHING on THE LAN tries to describe some of the beginning differences in instructional expectations. i hope it might help in planning for some of you who are setting up new facilities.

stan

TEACHING on THE LAN follows. As a "special supplement", I am also including an article by David Boulton. While quite different from our "normal" fare, "From Here to Implicity" raises an important issue in an original and literate manner. It reminded me of H.G. Wells' dictum, "History is a race between education and catastrophy." It is worthy of your attention.

Also included are exciting news from GLOSAS, two recommended sources of information available via email and my own musings on the fax revolution.

A la prochaine!


Anton Ljutic wcsanton@ccs.carleton.ca


Return to GLOSAS News Contents for this issue.

URL: http://library.fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/edit31.htm

March 1993


GLOSAS NEWS was orinally posted to the WWW at URL: http://library.fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/cont.htm by Tina Evans Greenwood, Library Instruction Coordinator, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado 81301, e-mail: greenwood_t@fortlewis.edu, and last updated May 7, 1999. By her permission the whole Website has been archived here at the University of Tennessee server directory of GLOSAS Chair Dr. Takeshi Utsumi from July 10, 2000 by Steve McCarty in Japan.