Delivering Digitally

Managing the Transition to the New Knowledge Media

Alastair Inglis, Vera Joosten, Peter Ling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780749434717
• eBook ISBN: 9781135727598
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This text investigates courseware delivery where resources are based on the World Wibe Web and are computer-managed. It follows a structured approach and provides practical support on general principles, best practice, skills needed and decisions to be made.

Part 1
Context

Chapter 1
The origins of the knowledge media

In this chapter we trace the several pathways of development that have led to the explosion of activity in delivery of courses by means of the knowledge media. We show that contrary to popular perception, the sudden spurt of activity is not the result of some unexpected breakthrough or breakthroughs but the result of a succession of developments dating back over more than three decades.

Revolution or evolution?

Every so often, a breakthrough in technology is achieved that transforms the way in which a particular function is performed. The development of the compact cassette is one such breakthrough. Within a few years of its first appearance, the compact cassette had made reel-to-reel recorders obsolete. In doing so, it set the scene for the emergence of the new lifestyle concept of ‘music on the move’.

The CD is another example of a breakthrough technology that, as it happened, emerged from the same industry as the compact cassette. The CD made the vinyl disk obsolete and opened up a new range of storage functions for disk media.

Yet, today in the information industry we are seeing changes that dwarf those brought about in the music industry by the compact cassette or the CD. Whether the magnitude of these changes is measured in terms of their speed or their extent, their impact can only be described as far-reaching. It is now felt in every part of society.

In the popular press, these changes are being attributed to the ‘digital revolution’. However, this rather abstract and evocative term is actually a shorthand way of referring to a rapid succession of technological breakthroughs.

The World Wide Web has for the first time provided the general public with a convenient access to the resources of the Internet in a visually appealing format. In doing so, it has begun to change the way in which people search for and access information.

The education and training community has been quick to grasp the significance of the Web s development. Educational innovators have begun to explore the Web’s possibilities. However, perhaps the most remarkable development has been the way in which education and training providers have rushed to exploit the potential of the Web for delivery of their courses and programmes. In an industry not noted for its willingness to embrace change, the enthusiasm with which the concept of online learning has been taken up by both teachers and administrators marks this as a watershed period.

Yet, is it accurate to describe what is happening as a ‘revolution’? Certainly, the pace at which change is occurring would suggest that it is. Although closer examination of the changes themselves may lead us to a different conclusion.

The shift to digital delivery of education and training programmes has been made possible, more than anything else, by the establishment of the World Wide Web. To anyone who is not familiar with the history of computing and the Internet, it may seem that these developments have come upon us without warning. Yet, if we trace the origins of each of these developments in turn, we soon see that the seeds of this so-called revolution were planted more than three decades ago.

The creation of the World Wide Web

The idea of the World Wide Web was the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Berners-Lee conceived of the Web as a convenient way of sharing documents over the Internet.The Internet was already well established by this time. However, it was being used as means of interconnecting large computers to carry electronic mail, provide remote access, and transport data files. Berners-Lee’s concept transformed the Internet into the transport medium for retrieval of hyperlinked documents.

The initial manifestation of the Web still required a certain amount of technical familiarity with computers and networking. What allowed people without a lot of technical knowledge to gain access to the Web was the release of the first Web browser, Mosaic. Mosaic was developed by Marc Andreeson at the National Supercomputer Laboratory (NCSA) in the United States. It was made available to the public for downloading over the Internet at no charge. The first alpha version of Mosaic—for X Windows, the windowing user interface for Unix—was released in February 1993. In September 1993, working versions of Mosaic were released for Windows and Macintosh. Even though it was slow and had very few of the features we all expect of Web browsers today, it immediately became popular.

The importance of Mosaic was that it gave the general public—even those with little knowledge of computing—the opportunity to glimpse what the World Wide Web might have to offer. By December 1993, major articles analysing the likely significance of the Worldwide Web had appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Economist.

In March 1994, Andreeson left NCSA to found the Mosaic Communications Corporation, which subsequently became Netscape Corporation. Two months later the first international World Wide Web conference was held at CERN in Geneva.

Laying the foundations for the Web

The creation of the World Wide Web was quite a simple concept. It depended only on the development of a universal set of standards to enable a document created on one machine to be displayed on another and for locating the document in the first place. The standards that were needed were embedded in two new protocols developed specially for the Web: Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

HTML defines a set of commands for formatting documents. If the format of a document is specified using HTML commands, then the document can be displayed on different machines using different operating systems and different types of displays, provided that each machine has a suitable browser installed. The browser interprets the commands according to the characteristics of the particular computer and displays the document in the way that best suits the machine.

Definition of the initial set of HTML commands was one of the most critical steps leading to the establishment of the World Wide Web. Yet, creation of such a standard language was not a completely new idea.

HTML is an application of Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML). SGML has been in existence for many years. It is a system for encoding electronic texts so that they can be displayed in any desired format, originally developed to enable text documents to be reproduced on different printers and typesetters. SGML was just starting to be incorporated into word-processing and page layout software just at the time that the idea of the Web started to take hold. SGML was therefore used to create HTML.

The concept of hypertext

Creation of the World Wide Web depended on adoption of the concept of hypertext—a way of structuring text, which permits the text to be expanded not just in one or two dimensions but in many dimensions. In the case of the World Wide Web, the hypertext concept is given expression through the use of links that connect locations in one document with other documents. The document to which a link points may be located on the same computer or on another computer, which may be located just across the corridor or on the other side of the world.

The concept of hypertext is not a new idea either. The term ‘hypertext’ was coined by Ted Nelson more than three decades ago. Nelson believed that the conventional methods of publishing could not continue to meet the needs of academia. He argued that the pressure on academics to publish was exhausting both the throughput capacity of academic publishers as well as the financial resources of academic and research libraries. He believed that the paper-based method of publishing would eventually be replaced by electronic methods.

Nelson s concept of hypertext was not original. It was based on an earlier idea that had been described by Vannevar Bush, science advisor to President Roosevelt during the Second World War (Bush, 1945). Bush believed that the vast amount of information that had been produced as a result of the research into the war effort should be made available to scientists. He conceived of a device that could make links between related text and illustrations in different research publications. He called this ‘memex’.

Nelson established the Xanadu Project to develop his concept of a worldwide hypertext system. Several prototypes of the Xanadu system were produced. For a time, the Xanadu Project was support by Autocad Corporation. When Autocad Corporation decided to divest itself of projects not related to its core business of computer-aided drafting systems, Nelson was invited to move to Japan to continue his research. However, the Xanadu system was never fully commercialized. The development of the World Wide Web therefore constitutes the first fully implemented hypertext system.

The World Wide Web violates a number of the principles that Nelson enunciated for the design of a robust hypertext system. For example, Nelson considered that every document in a hypertext system needed to be individually identified. On the Web, only the locations of documents are individually identified. Nelson also believed that, to ensure reliability, copies of documents needed to be stored in several locations. However, documents on the Web are not required to be duplicated. The effects of these and other differences are now starting to be felt. We shall return in the last chapter of this book to examine the main differences between Nelson’s original concept of hypertext and the way hypertext has been implemented on the Worldwide Web, and consider the implications that these differences are likely to have for the way the Web evolves.

The expansion of the Internet

The concept of a distributed hypertext database can only be implemented if there is a physical network linking the distributed servers. The physical network that supports the Worldwide Web is what we now know as the Internet. The Internet is not an integrated network like the type of local area network an organization might install within a building. It is a myriad of links that, like a spider’s web, criss-crosses the world interconnecting sites everywhere. It comprises data connections of all types: wire cables, optical cables, microwave links and even satellite links. It interconnects telecommunication companies, universities, research organizations, government departments, Internet service providers and private individuals.

The origins of the Internet can in fact be traced back as far as 1969, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defense set up an ARPANet to connect military, university and defence contractors.Then, with the advent of supercomputers, the US National Science Foundation found that ARPANet was unable to provide the level of service that was then required. It established NSFNet (National Science Foundation Network) in 1986 to provide universities and other research organizations with access to the five supercomputer centres.

Most major developed countries had established the beginnings of their own part of the Internet at least a decade ago too. In Australia, the Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet) was set up in 1989. In Britain, the Joint Academic Network (JANET) has been providing universities with a similar service for many years.

.In 1987, NSFNet was upgraded in capacity and in 1992 it was upgraded again. In 1995, NSF began moving across to a backbone provided by a commercial network provider.

From this, admittedly brief, historical account it can be seen that the establishment of the World Wide Web represents the convergence of five separate pathways of technological development:

1. origination of the concept of hypertext;
2. establishment of physical transport media—the Internet;
3. adoption of a common standard for communication—HTTP;
4. definition of a common standard for the formatting of Web pages—HTML;
5. development of Web server and Web browser software.

The seeds of these developments were planted more than three decades ago. However, it took the intervening 30 years for these technologies to mature to the stage where the separate pathways of development would start to converge. So, while in the press and in everyday con versation, the World Wide Web and the Internet are often spoken about as if they are one and the same, an understanding of their historical origins makes it clear that they are quite separate entities.

Interactive multimedia

Advances in the area of interactive multimedia have not had the dramatic impact of advances associated with the Web. They could most certainly be more accurately described as ‘evolutionary’ rather than ‘revolutionary’.

The focus of developmental activity in the field of interactive multimedia at present is on delivery of interactive multimedia over the Internet. Indeed, the term ‘interactive multimedia’ is now often combined with the term ‘hypermedia’ to signify the merging of interactive multimedia and Web presentation. Producers of interactive multimedia products want to be able to deliver their products via the Web, and developers of tools for interactive multimedia development want to be able to deliver software products that will more easily enable multimedia producers to do this.

However, this has been a relatively recent development, reflective of the Web’s growing importance to education, entertainment, and business. Both because the development has been so recent, and because the speed of the Internet is still a limiting factor, Web-based interactive multimedia has not yet displaced the more established modes of interactive multimedia presentation using physical media.

Interactive multimedia is generally understood to be a form of multimedia in which the presentation is carried in digital form and interaction between the viewer and the presentation is supported. The development of interactive multimedia technology was seen as particularly significant for education because it provided the means for learners to participate actively.

Development of the field of interactive multimedia followed closely on the heels of the development of the CD ROM. It has always been possible to move data to the display of a desktop computer more quickly from a local drive than from a file server or a mainframe computer. It has therefore always been possible to do more with data held on storage media attached directly to a workstation than it has with data retrieved remotely across a network. However, the potential of the desktop computer was for a long while limited by the amount of data that it was possible to store on portable storage media. The capacity of floppy disks was quite limited and early hard disk cartridges were not standard media and were relatively unreliable.

With the advent of optical disk technology that situation changed. At the time that the CD ROM first became available, not only did its capacity exceed that of 200 standard floppy disks, but its capacity also exceeded that of a standard hard drive. The greatest disadvantage of the first CD ROMs was that they were not re-recordable. The rate at which CD ROM drives could transfer data was also considerably less than the rate at which hard drives were able to transfer data.

Optical disk technology

In the home entertainment market, DVD players are currently replacing VCRs as the preferred technology for watching movies at home.

When the first edition of Delivering Digitally was published, no DVD player had yet app...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series editor's foreword
• Preface
• Part 1: Context
• Part 2: Implementation
• Part 3: Quality improvement
• Part 4: The future
• Glossary
• References
• Useful resources on the Web