2. Editor's Note: Desktop Conferencing Coming of Age?


Desktop conferencing, collaborative computing -- whatever we want to call it -- will revolutionize the way we use LANs.... We are on the verge of finding a whole new way to work with computers, and it bears an ironic resemblance to the way we used to work before we had computers. The other goods news is that it will deliver what videoconferencing has been promising all these years, at less cost and far more effectively. -- Bill Machrone, "Desktop conferencing comes of age, thanks to Fujitsu Networks", PC Week, 11/08/93 p. 89.

It all may have begun with smoke signals and tom-tom drums used to convey information at a distance, to tele-communicate. The message had to be encoded, transmitted, and decoded, the process not all that different from today's. So why get excited about a few new gizmos on the market which permit audio, video, graphics and text sharing and conferencing between two or more parties without the participants leaving their desk? No reason other than that the means for such endeavor are presently within nearly everyone's reach and that as the number of users increases exponentially, the applications and syntax for the new medium will develop accordingly. It would be tempting to speculate on what direction such developments might take. But "forecasting is difficult", say the Chinese, "especially forecasting the future". Far better to draw a parallel with and from the history of another medium.

"In the Beginning was the Word", says the Gospel of St. John. The "word" proved to be the decisive humanizing factor in history. But it was not without its own limitations. Words are ephemeral and they reach only as far as the voice can carry. The latter was originally solved by means of those smoke signals and drums; the former by that peculiar form of encoding which is known as writing.

What about writing? It requires an alphabet. The invention of that alphabet, in turn, required a major creative act: the "discovery" of the consonant. The consonant accompanies a vowel which it shapes or determines and with which it forms a syllable. The syllable is part of our common experience, a reasonable invention. Our letters, on the other hand, are inherently meaningless. The sounds they represent are also meaningless. In reading, a deliberate divorce is accomplished between conscious and subconscious: individual elements of the text - the letters - are ignored the better to grasp the "word", the whole. That is the first step in the development of writing.

Writing, as we know it, has gone through many more developments and refinements which have rendered it more precise and adapted to its many specialized uses. The ancient Greek manuscript of St. John's Gospel is not without fascination for the modern reader. Words are not separated by spaces, there is no punctuation, nor do sentences begin with capital letters. All these had to be invented. Then came printing. In one of his works, Ivan Ilich recounts some of the developments in printing which took centuries to accomplish: numbered page, division into chapters, table of contents, index, footnote, and so forth.

What is peculiar of these and other great inventions is that in retrospect they appear so natural and self-evident that one wonders why it took so long to "discover" them. At the same time, the very fact that they were so long in coming tends to suggest that they could not have been forecasted. They tended to meet the needs which the very development of writing had created.

What direction will the development of telecommunication follow and what new possibilities might it open? We do not know. But we are fairly certain of one aspect of this development: it is presently still in its infancy.

Although unwilling to "look into the seeds of time and tell which one will grow and which will not", we think it vital to closely follow at least those developments in conferencing technology which will transform global education. We therefore begin with this issue of GN an exploration of several relatively recent developments in propagating multimedia via the Internet or (twisted pair) telephone line. Some of the techniques and technologies described have been tested during GLOSAS' Global Lecture Hall (GLH) (TM) cyberconferences. Others are to be tested during the forthcoming GLH in July 1994. (Please see the announcement which follows.) All have one things in common: they are relatively inexpensive and accessible.

The intention of the current issue is to present brief insights into the uses of the new tools. More extensive files will be made available shortly via a single Gopher directory. Our collection presently includes information about MBONE, CU-SeeMe, nt and vat, Shared-X (using IRC), WWW (see within) as well as a number of commercial systems (SUN's ShowMe, Synectics' ShareView and WorldVision, FarSite, etc.). Contributions to our collection are welcomed and will be duly acknowledged.

FTP GLOSAS News (Gopher coming soon) -- At last, previous issues of this newsletter can now be retrieved by FTP from (IP 198.168.102.231), directory: /pub/glosas/global-education/newsletter

Please note that the same material is also available at the "DSI Teleteach Gopher" (gopher mora.usr.dsi.unimi.it) in Milan, Italy. We hope to have a North American Gopher running shortly.


For those not familiar with FTP procedures:

 
ftp 198.168.102.231 
login: anonymous 
password:   your email address (userid@node) 
cd             -  will change directory (e.g. cd/pub/glosas) will get you to
                  directory "glosas";
cdup           -  will take you one directory up in the hierarchy (e.g. from
                  "glosas" to "pub") from wherever you happen to be;
dir            -  will list the contents of a directory and show file sizes; if
                  something does not appear to be a file, check whether it has a
                  label d-x-x-x to indicate that it is a directory; if it does,
                  use cd to see what it holds;
get (filename) - will transfer the file into your home directory
                  within seconds; we have no binary files (yet);
bye            -  will conclude the ftp session and return you to your home
                  directory where transferred file(s) ought to be waiting


Return to GLOSAS News Contents for this issue.

URL: http://library.fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/edit41.htm

April 1994


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.