1 June
See a Chronicle article on collaborative writing
and some links to other sites
13 May 1999
I awoke this morning thinking about a means to center and structure the
Envisioning of
Information Technology. Often enough, what's needed for a
successful Initiative is a comprehensible, practical and relevant
goal to work toward, something expressed in terms that people can
recognize and commit themselves to without the discomfort that
often accompanies buzzwords and acronyms. Here's my
candidate:
Integrated Writing Environment
We have a rich array of tools broadly distributed: - a
thoroughly
networked campus computing environment,
- quite a lot of software to deal
with many different disciplinary, analytical, and presentation problems
(different character sets for various languages, image digitizing
and processing, formula
and chemical structure writing, spreadsheet and database packages,
bibliographical tools, GIS, ICPSR data, etc.),
- with GroupWise, a
potential
to link users together into groups which exchange documents as easily as
they dash off e-mail messages, and
- (need I say it?) the Web as a
distribution medium: an interface to external information sources, and a
means to communicate with intramural and extramural audiences.
What we lack is a coordinated vision of how these tools can (will, must)
work together --how to make the full suite available to users (including
training, but also delivery and support), how to inveigle (entice,
cajole) people to realize the potentials that surround them, how to build
toward a future in which these tools (and their successors) are taken for
granted.
Creating a campus-wide integrated writing environment is an
interesting and worthy challenge, one that so far as I know nobody has
already taken on. Once again it's something that a small liberal arts
institution is an ideal environment for, something that a larger
institution would have much more difficulty accomplishing. It's a project
that's made up of many small pieces, a lot of which we already have --it
doesn't require a lot of hardware investment, but it does
mean a lot of looking around at how others have done various bits. Some
examples:
- a persistent problem in making the Web useful to
mathematicians and physicists is the intractability of HTML for the
presentation of formulas and equations. Software to write them
exists and is widely used in the sciences --LATeX-- and there are
converters (latex2html is one) that exist. But so far as I know, only one
person at W&L (Tom Williams) is actively pursuing this potential for
Web presentation.
- GroupWise seems likely to make the use of e-mail attachments much
easier than formerly, and the folder system and possibilities
for sharing of files and inclusion of multimedia objects offer lots of
toothsome prospects
- GroupWise
WebPublisher looks like it may offer remarkable possibilities for
translation and presentation of documents, incorporating tracking
of successive versions and allowing display of a wide variety of formats
- other possibilities occur to me as horizon things --exams written on
computers instead of in bluebooks, collaborative composition environments
and electronic discussion forums for courses...
This scheme is really just another facet of the Portfolio and Freshman
Web Page projects, or rather it's the environment in which those projects
make greater sense. The focus upon writing (which tacitly includes
images and structured data) has appeal to all constituencies, and even
offers possibilities for longitudinal evaluation of skills. The emphasis
on better use of the tools we already have would gladden the hearts of
myrmidons of the budget.