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The Internet, or ‘Interweb’ as my friends like to call it could soon be going the way of the typewriter or perhaps even the dinosaur. The buzz on the Internet is all about ‘The GRID’ nowadays. Forget Internet 2, the Grid is faster than that. Currently being developed by CERN, the particle physics laboratory that brought us Internet I, the GRID will be so fast it will allow you to download entire movies, music collections, and of course mathematical data for those geeky scientists at speeds to ridiculous it will make the Internet look, well, pretty pathetic.
Imagine being able to transmit holographic images; to allow instant gaming online with millions of players worldwide; or to offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call. This is the potential of the GRID as it is seen right now. And this is not some future project – years away. The GRID will become active this summer when scientists at the Large Hadron Collider project in Europe – underground somewhere probably around Switzerland – will switch it on in order to collect all the data they hope to get from smashing two particles together in an attempt to find the ‘god particle’. I won’t go into detail on that project but it’s pretty cool. Essentially they are hoping to find what’s been termed the ‘Higgs boson’ or the originator of all mass; basically the seed from which the theoretical big bang came from. Whether this was created by God or was a spontaneous random creation of something else is not part of their project. Scientists actually aren’t even the ones who coined the term ‘god particle’ and most of them actually reject that term in favor of ‘Higgs boson’, but I digress.
This network, or GRID, is currently being built using only fibre optic cables running from CERN to 11 centers in the USA, Canada, the Far East, Europe, and other places. By this autumn many people will be able to switch from the Internet to the GRID theoretically. Moore’s law continues unabated.
The Economist has an article in the March 19th issue that discusses how open standards will, as they put it, ‘trump “walled gardens” on the internet’. The article is referring to closed systems on the internet such as Facebook and Second Life, which, much like the earliest subscription-based online services such as AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy, have closed virtual borders and are thus in the unenviable position of having to deal with the rest of the Internet proper.
Back in 1994 when these types of services were offering e-mail, chatrooms, discussion boards, and so forth it was the easiest way for people to get online. But people quickly realized they could venture outside of these closed systems (AOL, CompuServe) to access the wider Internet and everything glorious about it. These services failed to adapt to the wider condition of the open Internet and died unglorious deaths (with the curious exception of AOL which continued on to become an open web portal of some sort).
Virtual worlds like Second Life and social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace are facing similar threats. They have been useful as pioneers in their fields certainly, but as standards emerge that allow people to create their own communities and virtual worlds and to share data easily across these customized communities and virtual worlds the need for a closed system such as Second Life or Facebook will become less interesting.
The article provides some interesting links to sites I didn’t even know about that are offering such open services. One is called Multiverse which allows you to create your own virtual worlds (why have an island in Second Life when you can have your own universe the article asks). The other is Ning which allows people to setup their own social networks as well. This is just the beginning but I suspect Second Life and Facebook will have to deal with these emerging standards or die unglorious deaths like their predecessors CompuServe and Prodigy.
An excellent new article in the March 6th edition of “The Economist” magazine, technology quarterly, assesses the two diverging paths Wikipedia, the popular online collaborative encyclopedia, may take: it can either continue to be inclusive or it can choose to exercise greater editorial control. Those in favor of the inclusive approach note how popular the model is with the great majority of users, and also point to inclusiveness as one of the founding principles of Wikipedia. It’s true they admit that a great deal of trivial content is included in the encyclopedia along with a great deal of meaningful content. However this is part of the beauty of a wiki – it can include anything the designated users (and in Wikipedia’s case ‘designated users’ are anyone who signs up) want to include. And of course it’s not entirely a mess either because interested users of which there are scores edit and refine other people’s entries so everything automatically gets a little bit of editorial control. It’s just that the editors in this case are the great majority of Wikipedia users (humanity at large if you will).
Those who say Wikipedia itself should exercise greater editorial control over what is allowed to be content on the site and what is not allowed argue that Wikipedia’s reputation as a source of information is in peril and that only greater editorial control can save it. The problem with this argument is that the vast majority of Wikipedia readers and users find Wikipedia pages based on search. Therefore it really doesn’t matter if there are fewer articles about Pokemon characters for instance and more articles about members of the Polish parliament because it’s all based on search. Part of the enduring popularity of Wikipedia is based on the premise that when users search for content increasingly the first hit in a Google search for instance will return the Wikipedia page referencing whatever was searched.
Wikipedia is different than a traditional encyclopedia in that the included knowledge was never setup to cover a pre-determined set of criteria. It was meant to be a place where anyone could write articles about anything that interested them as long as other users showed a modicum of interest in the article. This is a worthy goal and I see no reason why Wikipedia should change the goal of their project.
We use Elluminate statewide in the University of Alaska system. It’s a great tool for distance-delivered synchronous learning. The people behind Elluminate have announced the release of version 8 which I’m hoping we’ll migrate to sometime in the near future. The following is a partial list of some of the new features to look forward to:
- An activity timer (useful for timed q&a sessions)
- Synchronized note-taking capabilities which even allow participant to edit their own notes in the recording!
- New whiteboard tools such as a multiline text editor (much needed), clickable urls, and the ability to cut and paste graphics from other applications
- Recordings will now include indices that are searchable
- They are expanding the full-duplex capacity of the audio chat feature to allow up to 6 simultaneous talkers
- Save and print icons have been added to the toolbar for easy access
- The ability to broadcast messages to all attendees even if they are in breakout rooms
WizIQ is a unique live video, text chat, and whiteboard tool that is absolutely free to use. It also includes a neat feature that Elluminate doesn’t have: a public document library.
Basically how it works is any member can teach or learn content online using the tool. You can build networks of learners and instructors, access and share content. You can send invites to all your webmail contacts (gmail, aol, yahoo, hotmail) and search for content by topic.
There is also a whole range of educational presentations and documents available. You can even share or get code to embed these presentations in your own site or blog.
Finally you can schedule sessions with other members using the calendar tool. All sessions are recorded and you can even engage in public sessions with content experts.
The Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium has a collaborative e-tutoring program that sounds effective. They have partnered a whole slew of schools into a collaborative framework that allows students to utilize tutors from other campuses. The e-tutoring progam allows instructors to use a variety of synchronous and asynchronous tools to meet student needs.
They have a cost-sharing structure as well as assessments for quality and supposedly rigorous pedagogical evaluations of course content and instructor methods. They say their tutoring offerings as well as participating institutions have grown substantially since they started the project.
It ‘sounds’ like a good model with important ramifications for students seeking access to quality help. It would be interesting to see the results of surveys of participating instructors and students to see what they thought was useful or not about the tutoring.
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