In placing this paper on the web, the author has taken care to provide classical-type references but offers the reader access to a document recovery service which will allow the reader to obtain [href3 - note class is lib] some of the material referred to, if so desired.
Finally the authors and colleagues battled with the incompleteness of current addressing systems, and started to think about what can be done with them. Setting targets within others' web pages does not seem possible, and ISSN & ISBN numbers do not (yet?) define sections within the books or journals they identify.
As recently as 1993, the use of Internet was an esoteric activity of a minority group, an elite? In this paper I unashamedly start by using my own experience as a gauge in trying to determine what Australians have been doing on the web until now.
In about 1984 I used the net (as we thought of it then) to correspond with newly-met colleagues in the US. I was given access to this facility by someone who had used it for some time but for me it was an exciting new idea. I battled with odd characters and Unix commands and sent small notes to and fro, until we were called by the Federal Police, the FBI. They wanted to know what we thought we were doing. Easy. We thought we were using a new kind of mail system; they told us we were using a highly secure information network. Just because acronyms like DARPA appeared on the screen, I was supposed to have realised this. Why? What was DARPA to me when I was doing email?
US defence arrangements and access to my friends were, it seemed to me, very compatible. (Compare the access available today to information about the US Defense Department (5). [href7])
Fortunately, it was decided that we were not doing anything bad and from then on our emailing worked happily through the various transformations of the network until we found ourselves embedded in AARNet (6) [href8], where we have belonged until now. (The current position is, it seems, threatened by lack of funds.) But the DARPA experience illustrates the point I want to work on is this paper. It is more a matter of what we think we are doing than what we are doing that determines our use of something like Internet.
Originally, I thought I was sending mail. The process involved writing on a different tablet: instead of writing on paper we had to type into a computer and suffer the problem of each line going as it was typed - for me the available editors were too burdensome to be worth using and it was hard enough to remember to press RETURN at the end of each line.
In those days word processing was not a common activity and keeping everything that was later printed on paper, in its electronic form, was not a common practice. Documents were word processed but the document was much more the product of the process than the text in electronic form, which is perhaps how we think of it now. The notion of attaching documents was not as obvious as it is now. If one had files to send to a remote colleague, then the files were sent by the file sending system. That made sense and it was quite sensible to use ftp (7) [href9] for this.
I remember the first time I was really struck by this process: we were working at RMIT with Hal Abelson who suggested we should make tee-shirts as souvenirs of our work. He phoned Gerry Sussman at MIT and asked him to ftp the postscript file of the MIT course logo. Minutes later we edited the file, added some Australian graphics and printed out a new logo. It was truly remarkable! The sending of files was still, however, different from attaching documents.
About the same time, for me email became etalk, with the screen being split and conversations held live across the net. Colleagues were encouraged to get on the net so we could communicate for free, and practices began to emerge which shaped the medium.
By the late 1980's it was clear that this was a different type of mail system, that within the messages one could receive from or offer support to colleagues, adding expressions of familiarity and camaraderie which would possibly not be expected in face-to-face or formal systems of communication. Typos were not usually tolerated on paper, especially as spell checkers became more prevalent, but in email they were OK. Informal messaging started to include a note of humour, often inspired serendipitously by mis-typing, but soon it was a regular occurrence. (More recently we have all learned to use symbols such as the now familiar :-) to convey sentiments.)
The tinge of humour on the net is well-established today. How often do we receive copies of collections of funny things kids and others have said, how surprised are we when a web page has not been finished, and instead we get an image that reminds us how hard it is to get everything done?
But it is not the humour that I want to draw attention to. It is that for so many email is the net.
Recently I attended a two-week workshop with multi-media experts. I sat at a terminal with Internet access and did what I always do - logged in to my computer so I could receive mail or messages (including ones to etalk) while I worked. I left that screen running behind what I was doing all day. During the days, my office functioned as usual (500 miles away) and I was asked the usual number of questions and asked others to do things in the usual way. I received mail and `spoke' to a number of colleagues when I could not do what I was trying to do; for instance etalked to someone in the office as we both searched the web for maps of New South Wales (8) [href10] and to someone in Perth as I tried to make a bit of software work. This was my usual practice and not very remarkable - except that others in the room thought I was a very odd net junkie.
I have to contrast the workshoppers' response, and the ideas of my supervisor at RMIT, with my own understanding of what I do. The workshoppers generally referred to what I was doing as `surfing the net'. They seemed to think I was `one of those' when in fact I am not a very avid surfer. My boss has reminded me that I am very often out of the office and has started to count days for fear that I will not get my work done if I am not at my desk often enough.
When I asked my fellow workshoppers if they used email, they all boasted that of course they did, but almost none of them could access it from Wollongong, they found. Why?
Email was to them, it seemed, a messaging system that worked in their institutional offices. There was some system, several explained to me, that let them get into it without too much bother. No, they couldn't tell me their password, they weren't responsible for that. I thought they meant they didn't know it but I soon discovered that they did not know why they had it, what it did. I had been alerted to this only days before I went to the workshop, and was fascinated. What was a password? One of my RMIT colleagues thought hers probably let her into the departmental network, that it may not have been the one that let her access her mail. She was one of dozens I have met who get messages and send them via email, never knowing that a facility for hourly forwarding of mail on local networks is not what many of us think of us as Internet systems.
The idea that workshop participants' email could follow them to a remote location was not familiar to these people. Does that mean they think of mail in the old way? That their mail is somehow in their computer on their desk, as in a letterbox, and not on the net generally (because their computer is part of the net)? I suspect so.
I recently conducted a three-day web workshop (9) [href11] for a mixed audience. Almost all confessed at the beginning that fear, anxiety, incredulity, and so on were high in their psyche, and they wanted to get rid of these feelings and learn about the web. We started by playing and people went everywhere - until I was called over by the pair who were in Switzerland and very anxious suddenly about how much money they had been spending - should they not have stayed there so long? How could they have avoided the expense? (Maybe they should have come back to Australia's home page between visits?)
My workshop participants felt what most people report, that they were doing the travelling (and we know travelling is expensive), or even if they were only accessing something long distance, that that too is expensive. We, as a group, had to contact this feeling before it was useful to know that our access time was not related to how long we spent staring at what we collected.
I have come to think it is a virtue to know that the travel is virtual (try 10 [href12]). If we, as users, can let go of old notions of travel and long-distance contact, and can enter into virtual travel mode, we are freer to work sensibly within the constraints of the system. A simple example might be provided by the use of bookmarks and careful reading of what has been found in v-travels. What costs is the down-loading of material and much of that is randomly requisitioned because there is a sense of needing to get somewhere as one might in a car, or plane, going to all the intermediate places en route.
Of course it is possible that some interesting places on the web will be found by contiguous v-travel, but that is not the only way to travel, and certainly not the most economical. But what a pity to spoil the metaphor, I hear. Is it, I wonder.
Coming from an interest in the design of computational environments, I see clearly (and fear) a move towards blind acceptance of the notion that film/video producers have the edge on most of us with respect to knowing how to use the new technologies. Have they? I have a feeling that the two-dimensional nature of film has been both a useful and crippling constraint on the best film producers, and that many of them welcome the chance to break into a third dimension, and will do so with as much creativity and flair as they used the old medium. It is not their medium, but they will bring to it a set of understandings that add richness. But equally I fear that for most, the linear nature of film has been allowed to dominate the idea of video to the extent that many do not see it as integral to video. But interactive multi-media is no more the medium of the computer environmentalists like myself either.
In addition, there are many people who seem to enjoy 'surfing the net', in a mode of viewing, browsing, but there are those who discourage or think less of others who do this. Browsing (or grazing) might need to be revalued and encouraged (see recent paper "Sense-Making and Sensitivities: New Pedagogies? New practices? New acceptance of old ways of learning?" submitted to Australian Educational Computing Journal).
I have found myself playing with an image of a family sitting around in a family room, watching screens but individually, perhaps with several people interacting via their screens, perhaps in a shared adventure game (11) [href13], or v-travel experience, but maintaining social contact, physical proximity, family grouping, and yet possibly more interactive in communication terms than they could be when TV was the medium of attention.
In the last few days there has been a debate on the net about the use of the word 'programming' as applied to interactive multi-media. Can it be programmed? asked one writer. Of course not, was the response, to my surprise, from someone but from another the response was of course. Which is right? What do we learn from the classification of the issue as debatable?
I was led to wonder what programming has come to mean. For many years a few of us have doggedly stuck to the idea that programming is being in control, and if interactive means anything, it means that. We are losing our battle, it seems. Interactive more often means being able to choose to press a button on a screen or to not press it; it is a binary activity, even when the screen is littered with buttons, or in the case of the web, hotspots.
Are the buttons to blame? Was the idea of buttons good for the purpose of helping people identify the action they needed to take and good for the building up, by `programming amateurs' of collections of hyperlinked material, but has it served that purpose at the expense of others? Surely one challenge is offered by the debate between hotspots and soft screens (achieved by having intelligent cursors which make it intuitive and natural to press when the mouse is in a certain location, to which the user's attention is alerted naturally and seamlessly by the changing of the cursor).
The clicking of buttons has become a very familiar activity. I have noticed that I can scan a screen full of text boxes and click on them arbitrarily these days, until I get the response I want, without even feeling guilty or the need to read what they offer. I don't need to know because I am not frightened of getting it wrong, I have learned that one button will be the right one and I can happily close my eyes to the text and click until I get what I want. I suspect now that kids do this a great deal of the time. I think maybe I am just an old traveller in computational environments and experience will teach us all to do this (in appropriate circumstances). I wonder if clicking my way around the world on the web is not an example of this kind of mode of interaction - mindless clicking to match the mindless channel-changing that accompanies TV watching for many.
We avoid working on the printed version of the TV program as we seem now to be avoiding thinking about what is where on the web. We are mindlessly dragging the practices (and metaphors) of the past into the present.
After a decade of working on the difficulties surrounding the use of inappropriate metaphors for technology, I have become very sensitive to the use and abuse of language in this context. At Sunrise, we have spent more than a decade (originally asking what a computer lenguage is, see Logo '84 papers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology) trying to find metaphors which better convey what we want to offer others as a useful image of some aspect of the technology with which we are dealing at any time, but have found that metaphors themselves are problematic. Metaphors replace the object of attention with another, and are chosen because the user feels that there is an appropriate mapping from one object to the other. What is left out in the use of the metaphor however, is the very aspect which suggests the suitability of the mapping, and it is often this which leads to confusion when it is not shared by the user of the metaphor and the recipient of the metaphoric image. (Metaphors are correctly of the form a:b as b:c, and the b is not stated when we substitute c for a. The widespread adoption of the term 'construction' within education to explain the process of learning has led to some strange consequences, which can be associated with the nature of ediface construction. (See 'Is Instructing to Constructing as Informing is to Conforming?" Paper delivered at Australian Colege of Education's Annual Conference, 1993.)
Metonymies (see "Sunrise Retreats: Reflecting on Reflections on Moments of Teaching to Improve the Potential of Teaching Moments", Sunrise Research Laboratory), are linguistically more useful replacements for the new, unfamiliar, or ill-defined terminology but in Sunrise we have found slogans, as we call them, the most useful. A slogan in this sense is a frequently used, shared expression which a community of practice can call upon for metonymic effect. What meaning a word or expression has, is determined by so many factors, unless it is worked on explicitly, it can become more of a point of confusion than clarity within a community. Slogans result from group work on meanings, and group acceptance of words/expressions which convey the meanings.
Programming v-travel is surely exactly what we want people to be able to do if they are to enjoy the web? In the everyday sense of programming, we expect people to know that they can choose what to see and when, what to do and when. In fact we are able to offer this activity on the fly these days, not forcing hard programs in isolation from what is being programmed, but extending the possibilities covered by programming to include bricolage, the mid-stream choice of the next activity derived from reactions and responses to the preceding activity.
And I suggest that programming the web is more than just programming our `movement' about within it. If we revalue the word distribution, and instead of constraining it to be the same as broadcasting (a one way activity), make it wider to include `access' and `distributed', we can see the distribution of material on the web (in this sense the web is being understood as a distributed data collection), then users can indeed program their use of the materials as well as their movement among them.
`Technology' is somehow most commonly used to mean things. `logy' is traditionally a suffix that means something about ways of thinking/talking about things. Perhaps the point I want to make is well made by saying that the word `technology' has been adapted to mean the objects themselves. The objects have been made into the ways of thinking, whatever they offered in the way of potential originally. Objects, artefacts, are only what they are understood to be, used for, and computers for many are typewriters, TVs, and so on.
Recognising that `technology' is so powerful, using it carefully can be empowering. Computer and communication companies know this. Marketers within the industry watch the trends and wait in the wings with new words to convey images which develop sustainable markets. They do not want to by-pass phases and in so doing miss opportunities for product development, market development. The whole `interactive multi-media' game has to be indicative of this. So are aspects of the cd/rom activities.
The French educationalists who have worked on the notions of didactic transposition offer ways of thinking about human relationships which are also useful here. The French image of the contrat didactique has the teacher bound to teach the students and the students bound to learn, but the more the teacher does for the students, the easier it is for both of them, and the more the students do what the teacher wants to see done, the easier it is for both of them. The transposition of this contract comes about when both parties collude to make life as easy as possible, and that is precisely when the least amount of teaching and learning are done. Thus the contract self-destructs.
In the context of the web, the same is true, it seems to me. If it is made very very easy for people to do everything, they end up doing almost nothing.
AusWeb95 The First Australian WorldWideWeb Conference