EXPLOITING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN ISSUES PAPER
31. This chapter describes information technology developments likely to be relevant to the higher education community. It concentrates on those areas where improvements and benefits can be predicted on the basis of current knowledge. However, IT has the capacity to surprise and planners and practitioners have to remain flexible: be warned!
32. More speculative IT developments which may have an important influence on the community beyond the year 2000 are dealt with separately and should be regarded with caution.
33. Until relatively recently software developments in terms of functionality and especially ease of use have failed to match the spectacular improvements in computer hardware performance; the inflexible and complex nature of such computer software goes a long way to explaining the disappointing performance of some IT initiatives. Unrealistic expectation, particularly on the part of non-IT literate managers, is another reason. However, few organisations are able to move quickly enough to take full advantage of some developments in IT. The development of the powerful PC and associated distributed computing techniques over the past five or six years is a good example. Many companies and institutions have been slow to adapt their mode of computer service provision to exploit this changing architecture. IT provision in higher education institutions is often at the leading edge and should remain there. This demands greater flexibility from those charged with its provision. Human resources and organisational aspects are probably more important than technology in ensuring the full potential of information systems is exploited; these issues vary greatly among the institutions and have to be addressed locally.
34. This section considers the developments in the underlying network technology; the services which are made available by an improved network are discussed in section 3.3.
35. It is hoped that the community can build on collaborative partnerships with telecommunication to provide appropriate bandwidth by the end of the century. ATM has enormous growth potential and is set to be the standard communications protocol of the opening decades of the next century. There are no indications of alternative or successor technologies at present.
36. Higher bandwidth and the flexibility of the multi-media ATM protocol ensures that there will be an advanced underlying networking capability for the community to exploit over the next ten years. It is the ability to develop appropriate applications and interfaces to use this technology that will determine the success of AARNet.
37. Perhaps of greater importance than bandwidth is the "reach" of the network. This is set to expand greatly over the next ten years. Developments by the Cable TV companies and others will enable high bandwidth network links to reach the home probably within five years. Both Optus and Telstra are laying fibre optic cable, at least to the street if not to the door, and this will provide the capability for broadband multi-media networking. The development of Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) wherever financially and technically sensible are seen as a particularly effective way of improving network reach locally.
38. Connectivity by microwave is also possible where line of sight exists and is becoming a cost effective option for speeds up to 34Mbps: this should improve with time.
39. A possibility for rural areas, unlikely to be widely served by the cable companies in the short term, is the use of ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network). This is a dial up service offering digital telecommunications as opposed to the analogue service used by voice and lowspeed data (19.2Kbps and less) networking. ISDN is also widely available internationally. The bandwidth currently offered by ISDN is adequate for conventional text and data networking but not true multi-media applications; broadband ISDN is being developed and should become widely available by the early years of the next century.
40. Enhanced telecommunication facilities will also become available to remote locations, via satellite, and to mobile users. Low broadband transmission, suited to text and low resolution images, is already possible, but not highly reliable; this will improve but its usefulness may be limited to field workers rather than offering a reliable service for teaching and learning purposes. Improvements in battery technology and transmission techniques will be critical factors.
41. Continuing improvements in the reliability of computer networks can be expected; this will ensure electronic communication in the form of e-mail and data transfer will be used more widely. Similarly, reliable links with a consistent response will be necessary for real time voice and video-communication over the network.
42. A very significant trend is the development of the Internet as a very widely available international network with tools designed to aid interrogation and dissemination of information sources. Spectacular growth in the use of AARNet has been largely due to the access of information from the World Wide Web (WWW).
43. The current developments in networking will lead to high bandwidth multi-media capabilities extending to the home, at least in urban areas, over the next few years. It is reasonable to suppose that the reach of the network will continue to expand into more rural areas and that equivalent international connectivity will become available by the turn of the century. Cost and regulatory factors will be important in determining the timescale of such expansion.
44. Beyond the year 2000 it is already clear that bandwidth of 1.5Gbps and higher will be possible and that integrated multi-media information sources will be available and may be the norm for the higher education community. A network infrastructure is however only an enabling tool; there will need to be developments in hardware and software systems to exploit the bandwidth and make functionally rich applications usable by staff and students. Video conferencing and even greater use of WWW will be major uses of the network and will demand improved international connectivity. Information must be made available easily and speedily on demand: developments in these areas are now considered.
45. Looking at past trends in the development of IT systems, it is possible to observe a number of fairly constant processes at work.
46. Users constantly require more and faster processing, for a whole variety of reasons. Within overall financial constraints, it can be assumed that a significant percentage of the budget of all organisations, and an increasing number of individuals, will be devoted to enhancement, rather than mere maintenance, of IT equipment. However this "user pull" is less than suppliers would like us to believe. The protection of existing investment is an extremely powerful factor in any decision to extend or replace computing equipment. The strength of this factor varies with the size of that investment, so it is more noticeable the larger the organisation and the more recent the investment.
47. IT equipment has a finite life either because it wears out, becomes incapable of running new software, or more likely, uneconomic to service. Suppliers seek to ensure this by increasing maintenance charges, or developing new and apparently attractive software which is incompatible with old hardware, specifically to persuade users that their old equipment must be replaced. Much computer hardware, and personal workstations in particular, should now be regarded as having a relatively short effective life of two to four years only.
48. While interesting new technologies are emerging all the time, they often become significant only when a supplier perceives a market advantage in exploiting them, or when a major and completely new project opens which has no "legacy" problem.
49. These factors seem to form an established process which has continued for many years. The emergence of new technology is the catalyst for change, but because it tends to thrive only when a combination of conditions provides the correct environment, its effect is much harder to foresee. Therefore, by extrapolating from the current position, it is possible to predict developments over about the next five years with a reasonable degree of accuracy; but it is quite likely that unexpected developments may start to appear towards the end of that period.
50. No supplier of note has produced any new hardware range to support any operating system other than a UNIX, Apple MAC, Windows or DOS variant for at least the last five years. Although manufacturers with existing proprietary ranges continue to try to find new markets for them (such as IBM with the AS-400, and Digital with VMS), such manufacturers also have successful industry standard equipment ranges. Intel-based PCs are the predominant choice for desktop processing. This is true even for domestic use, where, for anything but dedicated games consoles, all other architectures (except the Apple Mac) have disappeared. In the business world, any challenge by UNIX is the exception. The processing power delivered by these modest desktop machines is very large. In the desktop market, driven as much by games as anything else, multimedia devices have entered the high-volume, low-margin arena in a big way, as add-ons for Intel-based machines. Apple have been forced to match PC prices in order to compete with Windows in what once seemed their niche market of graphics and multimedia, and the Mac world does not yet benefit from the wide range of competing, high-volume clone suppliers of PC equipment. X-Windows has been very slow to keep up with the need for desktop processing of multimedia sound and images.
51. PC software which is already on the market and attracting users is more than capable of exploiting all the processors and peripherals now available, and is usually compatible with existing data, even if not always with earlier platforms. This is true, for example, of the new Microsoft products, and of the multimedia software which goes with them.
52. New PC hardware, often needed to support the new software, is almost universally compatible with earlier software and data. Multimedia hardware peripherals are now widely available and used. The vast majority of them are aimed at the PC market. Local disk storage is cheap, small, fast, and reliable, and continues to improve in all those areas. Enormous amounts of data can be stored locally. For most users, local storage is far cheaper and faster than transmitting data across a network. However, filestore management, including back-up, may dictate a networked solution although magneto-optical (MO) devices will offer considerable improvements in local backup capacity. In any case the connection of a PC to local, national or international networks, even if only intermittently, is becoming essential for most users.
53. UNIX machines are now the server of choice in organisations where IT has traditionally been centrally based, even though the desktop unit may be a PC. However, in other organisations where IT has developed from stand-alone PCs, there is considerable reluctance to move to UNIX, and various compromise network and server solutions have emerged.
54. Parallel machines are now fairly widely available in the business UNIX world for database use, but there is little sign of them in the PC world, nor of software to support them there.
55. A lot of research in science and engineering now consists to a large degree of computation. In many areas it is possible to say that the computation of models based upon known science and collected data is the only activity taking place. This leads to a continuing demand for faster machines, which is increasingly being met by parallelism. In the industrial world, there is growing awareness and use of parallel computing technology. There are signs that the advantage offered by very high speed processing is becoming commercially significant in many areas. The production of synthetic chemicals, and of new metallic compounds, are two areas where companies with the advantage of high performance computation can be seen to have competitive edge as a result.
56. As systems become more complex and powerful, both in terms of the applications they deliver and the volumes of data they can access, the need for effective help and navigation becomes more critical, and the already huge amount of computer power dedicated to the user interface continues to increase. Windows, Apple MAC and X-Windows packages can justify the massive amounts of processor power which their interfaces need, and not just because they look attractive. They offer the ordinary user better understanding and control of the core activity, and involve much less need to understand or manipulate the computing system which supports it.
57. Knowledge Representation (KR) is starting to deliver significant improvements in user assistance. KR is now beginning to offer developments such as user profiling, which can enable a system to "second guess" what a user wants, in such areas as selecting an appropriate database or section of a database. However, these techniques have yet to emerge into serious commercial production.
58. Everybody's margins are smaller. For all organisations and individuals, there is an established and continuing trend which demands greater and greater efficiency in order to survive. IT solutions tend to succeed to the extent that they enhance that efficiency.
59. PCs will be even more widespread and more powerful with enhanced facilities than they are now, and may cost less in real terms. Standard entry-level machines will have sound, video and high definition image capability. The operating system will still be based on Windows, and will consume an even larger amount of disk and memory requirements. However, local storage devices will outstrip the system's needs, and will normally be specified in gigabytes. Most users will have a very large personal data library. On-line help will start to incorporate knowledge representation systems.
60. Traditional proprietary mainframe systems will be retained by large corporate users with a need to compute very large algorithms, or for fast access to massive, multi-access databases. These will be provided by large specialised vector or parallel machines. Proprietary mainframe operating systems will survive for many years because of the large existing body of software and experience.
61. Midrange machines will be largely convergent-UNIX based, and all standard ranges will incorporate multiple parallel processors. However, these machines will be challenged to some extent by single-function server machines designed to deliver UNIX-like functions to the PC environment.
62. The user interface to large corporate and midrange machines will be predominantly X-Windows.
63. At this point, some of the more unpredictable technical issues need to be considered. How cheap/fast/prevalent will digital network connections become? Will the PC world be able to produce an operating system which matches the speed, reliability and versatility of the parallel UNIX platforms, for the levels of performance which users now need? How much more will KR deliver?
64. At present, the development of Windows NT has some of the symptoms of failure displayed by OS/2 when it was introduced five or six years ago. However, a radically new desktop operating system will be needed, because the performance challenge of the parallel UNIX machines, particularly with respect to the large multimedia and video sources which users will demand, will be much greater than could be delivered by a single-processor DOS system. Any new system is likely to be upward compatible from Windows to protect the considerable investment in application software already made.
65. Local disk storage has a lot more mileage in it yet, particularly as costs fall. However, if network companies are motivated to offer high-bandwidth digital services at competitive rates (to people in well-defined population areas of course) then network access may compete with it. Direct support of ATM can be expected from servers.
66. It seems likely that knowledge representation will find a very significant niche in guiding users around their systems. Without efficient navigation, in fact, the plethora of data of all kinds which will be available to end users in ten years time will be of little use. The "talking computer" is unlikely to emerge - for quite different reasons - but it seems highly probable that by 2005 the average user's machine will "know" most of what s/he wants to do most of the time.
67. The growth in the use of IT in the entertainment market has the potential to encourage significant developments in both hardware and system software. Currently computers are not easy to use and the interfaces are not intuitive. This will need to change as IT is used to control domestic appliances and provide the basis for improved communication and information sources to the home. It is likely that this area of the market will strongly influence the development of future systems and user interfaces.
68. The world is moving into the Information Age. Access to information and the ability to analyse it and thus "create" knowledge will be the hallmark of successful organisations. The dissemination of knowledge is also a prime purpose of Universities. Information therefore gives power and wealth generation potential.
69. During the next ten years the network will become far more pervasive and the availability of interactive networked resources and information will radically change the social fabric of Australia in a way that can be likened to the invention of the printing press which led to the widespread availability of books and newspapers, and the introduction of radio and television which made entertainment and information readily available to the mass population in their own homes.
70. The amount of information on the network is increasing radically both within the academic community and in the wider world. Already in the United States, the Internet is beginning to affect everyday life. For example, it is now possible to reserve hotel rooms and airline tickets, book concert tickets and correspond with national publications. This revolution is now taking off in Australia, for example with announcements almost every day on the television that some facility or another is available on-line on the Web. There is much interest in making more government information available as in the USA.
71. The ability to sensibly cache information at the local, regional and national levels will be important to minimise network traffic.
72. Within the publishing world, cost factors are driving libraries, publishers and others to look at novel ways of presenting and accessing information. New technologies, allied with this cost impetus, will bring new types of publications and new methods of production and distribution. Publications need no longer be in journal, book or article format, and so can be published as smaller items of research more rapidly. Text can be enhanced with coloured graphics, sound and video shown as hypertext or multimedia. Authors can publish directly on to the network, thus by-passing traditional publishing processes; electronic copies can be distributed instantaneously to many users.
73. Issues of copyright remain to be resolved, but these may become increasingly marginalised. Much of the information available on the Internet (both the data and the tools for navigation) is "free". Partly this is because people do things for fun, but more importantly the US Government's policy is to put information produced through public funding into the public domain. It seems inevitable, given this background, that the roles of publishers, distributors and libraries will change rapidly because of the opportunities provided by networking. Libraries will cease to have their present privileged position as information warehouses; information will be available and accessible from global sources.
74. All Australian universities now have access to the Internet. In less than two years' time most schools will also have access to the Internet either through EdNA or via a local university or through a commercial supplier. Many schools already have access. This will raise the expectations of such students as they enter higher education who will then be "information literate" in the way that many school leavers are now "computer literate".
75. Navigation tools are essential to enable users to identify useful information from the vast resources currently available. It is likely that this need will become even more pressing as the amount of available information increases exponentially over the coming decade. The lack of accepted standards in this area could act as a serious obstacle.
76. Initially demand will be for directories and resource guides to what is actually available, preferably with evaluation of the type of information contained and directions on how to reach it - the signposts and road maps of the electronic superhighways. Directories must answer the following questions: what is available; how relevant is it and where is it?
77. There are over 100 Wide Area Information Services (WAIS) on the Internet. The accepted US standard for searching WAIS is Z39.50. The WAIS software includes user interfaces and server software which provides automatic indexing of databases. Much of the software is available as public domain and this has encouraged development around the world. Z39.50 has thus emerged as the protocol of choice for distributed information retrieval systems but, as yet, it is not widely implemented. It will be some time before it routinely supports widespread interworking of systems, and many implementation issues are outstanding
78. There has been enormous growth in the use of electronic information tools over the past few years, in particular the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW brings together three major principles: hypertext; logical mark-up and global networking. By means of the WWW all forms of previously printed and electronically recorded media can be stored in a logical and device-independent form which can be accessed and distributed across the Internet. Hypertext is the core principle upon which WWW is based, allowing links to documents, images or any other anchor within such documents to be made. The breaking up of a document into logical elements, known as "marking up" enables documents to be viewed with a high degree of device portability. The Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) was developed as a non-proprietary delivery format for global hypertext.
79. There have been projects designed to push forward the functionality of IT in novel areas such as voice recognition, virtual reality and automatic language translation for many years now. Some, or all, of these may come to fruition in the form of useable products by the year 2005. If so, they have clear implications for the higher education sector.
80. A computer that you can talk to, and which will presumably answer back, is a natural improvement to the man/machine interface. Computer generated speech quality will improve. As such it will be an important step forward in making IT an even more pervasive element in life with consequent productivity gains. Significant improvement in handwriting recognition and the further development of user-friendly interfaces such as pen and touch will also take place within the next ten years.
81. Virtual Reality (VR) has clear potential as a teaching and learning aid as well as for modelling and simulation activities. VR is a technology which will greatly speed up the development of virtual laboratories where complex, expensive or dangerous experiments can be simulated on a computer. Although VR requires considerable high speed computing resources it is the development of suitable peripherals to provide tactile and visual input and feedback where most work is required before VR, especially immersive VR, can significantly impact the teaching and learning experience. The use of VR in research work is, however, a more promising development in the near future.
82. Automatic language translation has been a goal of many research and development projects. Convincing demonstrations are still lacking. It has the potential to revolutionise international information exchange and to open up a wealth of research material, particularly from countries with "difficult" languages for the English speaking world such as Japanese, Chinese (in its many dialects), Russian and Arabic.
83. Substantial improvements in portable computing can be expected. Portable workstations will be smaller with enhanced capabilities including cellular radio communications. The resolution and quality of screens will also improve. This will greatly extend the scale of teleworking. There will also be considerably improved user interfaces developed which will be intuitive in nature and easier to use. This will be a spin-off of the greater use of computers for entertainment and leisure.
84. There will be considerable improvements in systems and application software through object oriented programming leading to greater productivity, shorter development time and enhanced functionality and ease of use. Formal proving methods, especially safety critical analysis will continue to improve and take a more important role in software development. This will be essential if the information age is to become a reality to society at large.
85. Electronic badges will create a "follow me" environment whereby computer systems can keep track of the location of an individual within the campus such that telephone calls can be automatically re-routed and a local PC can be activated and will respond as if it were your local workstation.
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