Volume 2. No 1
Information Technology News of the University of California, Davis October 1993
Information Technology News of the University of California, Davis October 1993
The Network 21 Project to construct a more robust and ubiquitous network on campus encompasses more than the installation of fiber-optic cable, equipment closets, distribution frames, access modules, and miscellaneous construction work. Rather, Network 21 is about placing in the hands of campus faculty, students, and staff the power to create a customized working environment suited to each individual, with immediate access to resources across the Davis campus and from around the world.
To illustrate this vision for the UC Davis infrastructure, three scenarios are presented here as part of a working-day portrait of campus life under the auspices of a completed Network 21. These vignettes are written from the perspectives of a faculty member, student, and staff member in a hypothetical year when all central administrative systems and all departmental systems are linked and when high-speed networking is as commonplace on campus as bicycles are now.
The IT Times editorial staff invites submissions from readers of their own visions of a completely networked campus of the future. Make this a two-way affair by sending us descriptions of your applications, experiences, and ideas pertinent to this topic. IT would especially like to hear from those persons applying the services of a supercomputer for research. Send all materials to Ivars Balkits, Planning, Strategy & Administration; e-mail: isbalkits@ucdavis.edu; voice: 752-5965.
DISCLAIMER: Please keep in mind that these scenarios are highly speculative in nature. Though most technologies described are available now, their implementation at UC Davis depends on factors (financial, organizational, political) that are difficult to assess and, in any case, beyond the scope of this article.
Professor A (Faculty Member in African Studies) For the half-hour before starting work that day, Professor A had been listening in her office to the popular news program All Technologies Considered. Now, it was time to turn to the task of preparing a book list for an upper-division course she would be teaching that winter: AS 099 - Effects of Networked Communications on North African Politics.
Instead of leaning over to turn off the knob on a radio, she clicked once on the mouse attached to her desktop workstation. Since the University had equipped it with free Internet access, she had decided to subscribe to the voice-based news and information service NREN Talk Radio. (NREN = National Research & Educational Network.)
With a second click, Professor A opened a connection to the Campus-wide Information System and the menu item Online Campus Bookstore Catalog. The professor had been using this service since 1993, her first year with the University, to select and order textbooks.
The custom publishing system at the Bookstore (similar to Primus at UC San Diego) allowed her to have one book printed straight out of the can for her students and one composed from diverse materials in the database. For that second book, she chose essays, maps, etchings, and statistical data from various publications and punched in her order, knowing that the system would put all those elements together with an appropriate table of contents and index, pagination, acknowledgments, and copyright attribution.
As an afterthought, Professor A decided to require students to send away via the Internet for one electronic shareware textbook. "That settles the administrative end of the days business," thought the professor. "Now to get cracking on the research for Linked Continent (an annual conference initiated in the early 1990s to foster information-technology related activities in Africa)."
For the conference, Professor A was preparing a paper on the history of networked distance education in Africa. Earlier that week, she had signed onto the listserv mailing list AFRICANA (Information Technology and Africa). Now, firing up the electronic mail application, she soon was immersed in the listserv discussion, following the thread of a topic she herself had initiated the day she had signed on.
After a few messages, Professor A came across exactly what she needed (volunteered by a colleague in Ghana): a reference to the online location of the 1990 publication Distance Education in Anglophone Africa. She would explore that lead later in the day, using the FTP program to access the online archive and retrieve the document.
"Just one more message, "thought Professor A.
The next message was from a colleague on campus, announcing that a multimedia module on African agriculture had been tied into the UC Davis Nematode Library. This new module would allow African teachers and researchers to access the most extensive nematode database in the world, an extremely valuable resource considering the major impact of nematodes on crop and livestock production. Professor A made a note, using the desktop Reminder utility, to contact the UCD Nematology department for statistics on the module's use by African teachers for her research.
For the remainder of the afternoon, Professor A reviewed and supplied electronic comments to the first chapters of a graduate thesis interactively discussing those changes with the student (based in Fresno) via a workstation-based video teleconference. This setup allowed the two to see and hear each other and to view and annotate the document on their screens. All communications (audio, video, and the document window) were conducted over the Internet wide area network.
At 5:00 p.m., she was strongly tempted to just curl up with her notebook computer to read an interactive hypertext novel she had downloaded from an archive in Cambridge, MA. Professor A really enjoyed moving forward and backward through the narrative to read it from the point of view of any character she selected.
"But duty calls," thought Professor A, and she switched over to the application that would connect her via the campus network to a videoconferenced seminar on the effects of global weather change on the African Sahara. Environmental studies was not an area she had studied much, but she looked forward to this new subject to give her additional understanding of factors affecting African life.
In the minutes before the 8:00 a.m. class, B queried the BANNER Student Information System for the status of his federal loan, checked which electives were still open in Comparative Literature, and printed out his revised class schedule on the attached eight-inch printer. Then he hurried on to the upper-division class that Professor A had allowed him to attend, though still a sophomore, because of his many years in Morocco as the son of diplomats.
At 9:00 a.m., B walked over to the network docking station in Hart Hall, connected his laptop computer to the campus network, and (supplying the same usercode and password) accessed the visualization lab server in Academic Surge. For the next few hours, B continued work on a 3-D visualization exercise for a Physics class that incorporated sound, video, and computer animation as well as text. Around noon, he submitted this report through file transfer over the network to the instructor's workstation in Engineering II.
After lunch, B returned to the dorm to study for a short quiz in Nutrition to be distributed that afternoon over the class newsgroup on the Usenet News system.
At 2:00 p.m., he logged onto the campus network from his room. Using electronic mail, B decided to go ahead and enroll in the 30-week astronomy course offered via the Internet by Tidewater Community College in Virginia. This course, featuring online guest lecturers renown in the field of astronomy, utilized conferencing, file transfer, and email to foster class interaction.
Once he completed the course, B's transcript would be automatically updated through the national transcript service, and Tidewater would debit his UCD account. B was grateful that his parents could transfer funds to his educational account electronically through the University payment plan.
Next, B activated the newsreader program and downloaded the quiz to his desktop computer from the Usenet newsgroup. Browsing a bit, he learned, through a newsgroup devoted to astronomy, of an interactive CD created by a Los-Angeles-based astrophysicist and musician. This CD contained recordings of radiowave transmissions collected from a galaxy 180 million light-years away. B made a note, using the desktop Reminder utility, to check whether this product was listed in the online catalog of a CD clearinghouse based in San Jose.
B then completed the quiz, submitted it to the instructor by email, and headed back to campus for his 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. classes. When those were over, he walked over to the Memorial Union videoconferencing center to attend the presentation delivered by a UCSC faculty member from Lick Observatory to UC students systemwide.
The MU was a great place for students to have a wholesome dinner, share a big screen videoconference, and exchange ideas. Based on the movie review he'd seen on the Campuswide Information System, B decided to stay for the ASUCD-sponsored movie that followed the videoconference.
Staff Member C (Management Services Officer, Academic Department) The office had just opened for the day's business, and her assistant found C already at work writing comments in the margin of an administrative advisory committee report. The report was displayed on an electronic whiteboard hanging on the wall behind C's desk.
C stopped writing long enough to sign her name to the bit of paper her assistant held out to her. It was one the few paper items still circulating in offices at the school -- a birthday card for a fellow employee.
Her assistant watched as a second annotation appeared in the margin of the report, apparently writing itself on the MSO's whiteboard. Then he left, unruffled. The software on the campus white-boards allowed personnel in several departments to brainstorm or work on drafts of the same document, simultaneously or asynchronously. It had been that way for years.
The MSO rolled the whiteboard sheet through the machine to load that information to a diskette for backup -- just as her desktop workstation notified her that she had mail waiting: "You have mail waiting," it said, "with message # 8 requiring immediate attention." The machine spoke in the voice of her favorite opera tenor, which C had selected from the Clip Sound CD that came bundled with the system
C checked her email: Open electronic mail, and read message #8. C preferred to use the voice recognition software for commands to email and voice mail (integrated since 1995 with the digital network). The tenor began the task set for it.
The urgent request was from the department head to have a grant payment delivered via the worldwide network to a field researcher's bank account in Vienna. Disabling the voice recognition system temporarily, C authorized the payment by keying in a digital signature assigned to her.
Next, C had the tenor read a bulletin forwarded from a national computer virus alert group by her departmental net administrator. The message concerned recent wide-spread attacks on anonymous FTP servers connected to the Internet. Speaking the message into mail, C agreed with the net administrator that, to thwart criminal hackers, the departmental servers should be reconfigured according to the guidelines in the bulletin.
Turning from email (after scanning/responding to another 20-30 messages), C next signed onto the financial system to update departmental personnel information with pay rates received from the merit committees. She was able to perform this function directly on the personnel screen, which she knew would automatically distribute the change through all personnel and budget documents.
"Close accounting," said C, to which the opera tenor responded with the dying strains of the Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci."
"I just love this feature," thought C, and then said aloud: "Now where did I put that DCN report?"
"Please repeat that request." The MSO made a note to turn down the sensors for the voice recognition system someday. For the past several months, the MSO had been serving as the chair of a committee to streamline the Davis Community Network's civil emergency warning system. This service had been set up to deal primarily with incidents such as the release of toxic materials in rail, truck, or industrial accidents. It also warned elderly persons and parents of young children whenever temperatures climbed above the 110 degree mark -- a fairly common occurrence in the summers of the past decade.
Relative to that role, C was preparing a report to be presented to City and University officials at an FTF (face-to-face meeting) to be held later that week. To complete it, she need to attach portions of the Policy & Procedure manual. So she activated her StarGopher client, connected to the Campuswide Information System, conducted a keyword search of the online manual, and downloaded the sections she needed. Once imported into a word-processed document and formatted appropriately, those sections and the report were ready for distribution via the email alias for the committee.
A copy of that email message went over the Internet to be printed on the City Hall printer.
C looked up at the clock and noted that she had worked through lunch. But now it was time to connect to the Contracts and Grants videoconference from her PC. A full-motion video window appeared next to the whiteboard window. An additional text window displayed the agenda and auxiliary visuals for the meeting. That activity took up the greater part of C's afternoon. A complete record of the videoconference was stored on the Contracts and Grants server for access and review at a later date through the campus network. All supplementary materials, document drafts, and minutes also were stored on the server as the official repository of record for this workgroup.
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