4.1.5 Networks
Within each project at some point the role of networks was discussed.
Because this was a selection criteria for the choice of projects to be
studied in this research, the relevance of the issues within the context
of each project is not surprising. However, a variation in the rationale
behind the selection was discovered. Projects chose the functionality based
on different goals, and achieved different ends. In the ESCAPE project,
the emphasis on the role of the network emerged relatively late in the project,
and the project's educational goals were not greatly revised to emphasize new
capabilities like collaboration. The role remained similar to the traditional
uses of computer networks for educational computing, which is to provide access
to a central set of data, and allow for easy access and maintenance. In contrast,
the Context32 project used Intermedia to take
full advantage of the multi-user structure
that a client/server architecture allows to support collaborative educational
endeavors. Intermedia software could also support the broader educational
goals of collaboration among scholars:
Another goal in the design of Intermedia is to support
collaboration between and among faculty and students. We hope to make it
easier for faculty to develop materials with their colleagues. We also
seek to make it both easy and inviting for students to add to and modify
the materials presented to them by their instructors. To do this we need
a multi-user system that identifies each student and faculty member and
assigns various levels of permission to each. We also need a system that
allows many users to share the same materials at the same time. The workstation
computing environment in which Intermedia was built is based on a high-speed
Ethernet network and shared file system. These tools allowed groups of faculty
authors working on separate machines on a network to connect materials together
into a single collection. Students could also add materials to the collection
and share their comments and links with their fellow students and the faculty.
(Launhardt and Kahn, 1991, p. 2)
Landow was then able to use these capabilities to
support collaborative construction of materials by students. At Project Athena,
powerful client/server architectures were developed, but the full employment
of these capabilities within courseware was limited. This appears to
have been typical of the early projects which utilized Athena's innovative
client/server distributed computing approach:
The educational model guiding the early years of Project
Athena did little to advance learning in this collaborative sense:
it comprised islands consisting of individual students using individual
instructional or analytic programs on individual workstations,
interacting vertically with their instructor. More elaborate interactions
among students, for example in workstation clusters or through "discuss" forums,
and between students and faculty were incidental. Only recently have interaction
and collaboration become important objectives in their own right.
(Committee on Academic Computation for the 1990's and Beyond, 1990a, p. 26)
In a report on the Project Athena experience late in its experimental phase,
it appears that the potential impact of the access to multi-user networks
arranged in a distributed paradigm was recognized for its impact outside of
the context of the courseware:
In addition to its expected effects on technology, pedagogy,
and organization, the Committee on Academic Computation found that Project
Athena has had substantial effects on the academic community at MIT, on the
ability and inclination of faculty and students to communicate easily and
effectively across physical, political, and disciplinary boundaries.
Although the individual indicators of these effects are inauspicious--
substantial use of electronic mail, extensive participation in electronic
discussion forums, paperless submission and return of written work,
extensive asynchronous access to teaching assistants on-line access
to library information their aggregate impact on intra-Institute
communication has been striking. The extension of key project
Athena services in this domain to personal computers, through dialup connections,
has sharply reinforced the trend.
(Jackson, 1991, p. 20-4)
In the Athena projects studied (TODOR,
Mechanics 2.01, PGT),
the above outcomes were generally acknowledged within the context of the courses discussed,
although the outcomes were not part of the courseware project's stated goals.
Over time the full power of the new paradigm has become fully appreciated at MIT,
and is encouraged so that it is likely to become a larger part of courseware projects
in the future (Jackson, 1991). The likelihood of
these goals being adopted is greatly enhanced by capabilities which are being
incorporated into the AthenaMuse software which is designed to support collaborative endeavors.