Barry McMullin
Dean of Teaching and Learning
October 1999
Working Paper odtl-1999-01
Philip Greenspun, of MIT and Ars Digita LLC, is an acknowledged authority in the development of computer supported collaborative communities, and has articulated a vision of how such technology can be a catalyst for dramatically widening access to education--both formal and informal--into the next century.
Philip was originally scheduled to visit Dublin from 13-15th October 1999 in order to conduct a seminar for a group of 1400 process consultants from Andersen Consulting. Arising from ongoing links between the DCU strategy office and MIT, it was suggested that he might be able to also deliver a guest lecture at DCU during the same trip. Being already familiar with Philip's work, especially through his highly regarded book on web publishing, I was delighted to be able to host the lecture under the rubric of the ODTL.
The lecture was delivered on the afternoon of October 13th 1999, attracting a large attendance from the DCU community and substantial interest from other groups and individuals outside the University.
To begin at the end (!), Philip Greenspun has a vision of the emergence of true network computing in the very immediate future. He describes this with the slogan Delenda est Desktop Apps, explained at more length in his book as follows:
Marcus Porcius Cato (234 BC to 149 BC) went onto the floor of the Roman Senate every day and decreed "Delenda est Carthago" ("Carthage must be destroyed"). My personal crusade since 1993 has been against desktop applications. Desktop apps promised to deliver the power of computers to the ordinary citizen; in fact, they delivered the pain of a corporate system administration job right into the ordinary citizen's home or office. Desktop apps promised to help people collaborate; in fact they have imprisoned individual contributions on individual machines. What people need and, with the ubiquitous Internet, can finally get, are collaborative Web-based applications. Web-based apps let people use computers without becoming mired in system administration. Web-based apps help people collaborate. Web-based apps can weave an individual's contribution into a larger work produced by many people over the decades. The future is WimpyPoint (wimpy.arsdigita.com), not PowerPoint.
If Web-based apps are so great, why aren't we all using them now? Desktop apps serve one user at a time and tend to be copies of systems from the '60s and '70s. Web-based apps serve thousands of users simultaneously and oftentimes are based on completely new service ideas. Thus Web-based apps require programmers with great skill, imagination, and taste.
- http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/future.html
The WimpyPoint system mentioned here is a web based application (originally developed by Greenspun himself) for preparing ``slide'' presentations, somewhat in the style of Microsoft Powerpoint. However it differs in several important respects. It happens to be free. It also (arguably) has relatively impoverished functionality (e.g., no bundled clip art or background libraries etc.). But it has a couple of key advantages. Because the presentation is stored on a web server, accessed through a web interface, it can be used and modified from any computer anywhere in the world which has web access; and this can be done by anyone in the world who is authorised by the creator. This turns out to be a surprisingly powerful idea:
You can build a slide presentation in WimpyPoint from any Web browser anywhere in the world. WimpyPoint will hold onto your presentation in a professional maintained and backed up relational database management system (Oracle 8). You can forget your laptop. You can drop your laptop. You will still be able to give your presentation anywhere in the world that you can find a Web browser. More interestingly, WimpyPoint lets you work with colleagues. From your desk at MIT, you can authorize a friend at Stanford to edit your presentation, the two of you can work together until you're satisfied, and then you can both go into a conference room at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and give your talk from our server.
- http://wimpy.arsdigita.com/
As mentioned above, this vision of the end of relatively isolated desktop applications came at the end of the lecture, but I have brought it up first because, of course, Greenspun practises exactly what he preaches. His lecture was given precisely in the manner he describes. He brought no printed slides, no diskettes, no laptop computer. He simply relied (by prior arrangement, admittedly!) on his hosts providing any computer at all, with web access and a projection facility--in the same way as lecturers currently expect and rely on the provision of, say, an OHP or blackboard and chalk.
An ancillary, but by no means trivial, benefit of this approach is that you too can now very simply look up that slide presentation--at:
http://wimpy.arsdigita.com/public/presentation-top.adp?presentation_id=19823&user_id=561
Indeed, since this was made available the day before the lecture, you could have looked it up in advance--had you still been undecided about coming along!
Of course, the idea of publishing slide presentations on the web per se is not particularly innovative at this stage; but Greenspun's system is seamless (as a presentation is developed it is already being simultaneously published and archived--there is no need for a separate ``publishing'' stage). Better still, there is no possibility of the dreaded ``version mis-match'', where a presentation authored with a newer version of the application software cannot be accessed with an older version. With WimpyPoint you are always ``automatically'' using the newest version, and barring actual errors in implementation, you are guaranteed backward compatibility too.
So Greenspun walked his talk, and gave his lecture in Dublin against the backdrop of a slide presentation accessed in real time from an ArsDigita server in Boston. And since this slide presentation is now permanently (?) archived and accessible, there is little point in my regurgitating the substance of the lecture again here; which is why, in turn, I am confining myself to reflecting on the less intentional, but no less significant, ``meta-messages'' of the technological medium.
In particular, while the use of WimpyPoint was certainly interesting in itself, it became rather more authentic than was perhaps originally planned. Not only did it illustrate the undoubted attractions of this sort of approach, it also clearly demonstrated some possible pitfalls.
Firstly, despite the prior arrangement to ensure the availability of a computer with ``web connectivity'', and despite testing of the equipment immediately before the lecture, the very first site access which Greenspun attempted, failed miserably. Thankfully, after some small delay, panic, and general embarrassment on the part of the host (!), things spontaneously started working again. (The problem may--or may not--have been due to that fact that this first access was to a ``secure'' site, using the so-called HTTPS protocol, which had not been explicitly tested in advance; but it was not reproducible and so, for now, must simply be consigned to the annals of the inexplicable...)
To be fair, the WimpyPoint presentation itself worked flawlessly for the rest of the lecture, so thumbs-up for that idea; but unfortunately, that was not the only web site/application to be demonstrated, and a generic caveat in the WimpyPoint documentation became painfully relevant here:
... Naturally this assumes that our machine is up and running and the various Internet backbones are operating properly. We strive for maximum reliability but nobody can achieve 100% uptime for any Internet service. If your career absolutely positively depends on a presentation, we recommend using the Print button on your Web browser to make a hardcopy of your slides...
- http://wimpy.arsdigita.com/
The advice is excellent--but it doesn't help if what you want to do is actually demonstrate an interactive web site or service live during your lecture. As the talk progressed, the network response time was visibly slowing. This became most noticeable with one of the most sophisticated and (potentially) impressive sites to be demonstrated--ScoreCard:
http://www.scorecard.org/
ScoreCard is a project of the US Environmental Defense Fund which provides access to a 3.8GByte database of information on pollution in the US. This works most effectively through intensive use of graphics in the web interface. Unfortunately, the collision between this increased traffic demand and the already saturating DCU trans-atlantic Internet connectivity meant that access slowed to the unusable, and this particular demonstration had to be abandoned (:-(
Still, every cloud has a silver lining. Even while access to ScoreCard had slowed to a crawl, the response of the WimpyPoint presentation server, and indeed, a variety of other ArsDigita resources, was still sparkling. How can that be? Well, there were probably a number of interacting factors, but one significant one was surely the difference between ``simple'' text-only pages (even generated dynamically from a database server) and pages with substantial graphic content. It seems there is a lesson there - at least for the immediate future of web site design (see also The Need for Speed by Jakob Nielsen, the ``guru of web usability'')...
But the biggest meta lesson I personally gleaned from Philip Greenspun's lecture only struck home some days afterward, while I was composing this very report.
Two people quite independently happened to made a similar comment to me--namely that they felt that Greenspun, in extolling the vast potential for online ``education'', had downplayed or neglected the importance of assessing the quality (or, perhaps, ``scholarship'') of such facilities. Now this may be a fair criticism, or it may not--and I don't actually want to comment on that here, as such. Rather: the thing that struck me like a sledgehammer was that, once I had ``completed'' this report, and published it as my personal, parochial, account of this event, it would then be extremely cumbersome for any of the other participants to either correct it or elaborate upon it.
And in retrospect, that now just seems silly.
The point of this document was to capture, in a different but more lasting form, some of the valuable impact of this lecture, for the benefit of the DCU community. But there's that word again--``community''. Wouldn't it have been so much more valuable if it could have been created by a collaborative process, benefiting from perspectives, corrections and elaborations from a variety of different participants (maybe even Philip himself)? And such a thing is not really technically difficult anymore: all it needs is a suitable, database backed, web accessible, community system.
Now where would we find one of those...
Finally, for convenience, I gather together here, in no particular order, all the various sites and services referred to in the talk.
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