Mg-Ed-Dv invites information on interesting Mgt Ed articles & books
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The Chronicle of Higher Education Online today had an article on a new book
on human-centered computers. The CHE writer Florence Olsen began:
Suppose computers were all around you, like oxygen. And suppose using those
computers was as easy as breathing. That's the idea behind the Oxygen
Project, a five-year, $50-million research effort by the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science and the M.I.T.
Artificial Intelligence Lab. Its goal is to redesign computers to make them
easier to use.
The Oxygen project is now the subject of a book by Michael L. Dertouzos, the
director of M.I.T.'s computer-science laboratory. In The Unfinished
Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us
(HarperCollins, $26), Mr. Dertouzos says the United States could achieve a
300-percent increase in productivity in the 21st century if computers were
easier to use. Such gains in productivity would be achieved by processing
information more efficiently. Even professors and graduate students, he
says, could accomplish many routine tasks in a fraction of the time they now
take.
The 250 researchers involved in the Oxygen Project are building hardware and
software prototypes for what they refer to as "human-centered computing."
Next year they will begin testing the prototypes. So far, the research has
produced two types of hardware, Mr. Dertouzos writes.
The Handy 21 -- for "21st century" -- is a hand-held, battery-powered device
that can be reprogrammed in an instant by downloading software to perform
different functions. With the appropriate software, it can become a computer
on a high-speed network, a cell phone, a two-way radio, an FM or AM radio,
or a television. It has no keypad because it understands human speech.
A second type of hardware, the Enviro 21, is a stationary computer that
could be installed in the walls of offices and other places where people
spend much of their time. It is flexible, like the Handy 21, but it has more
powerful processors and a capacity to store large amounts of information. It
would have connections to the Internet and to other networks, as well as to
fax machines, electronic whiteboards, printers, scanners, cameras,
microphones, and other hardware accessories.
....
Ideas and terms thrown around in the rest of the article include
"speech switch"
"prerecorded speech fragments spoken by a real person."
"the Internet will become a thousand times faster than it is today, and the
price of a billion bytes of storage capacity will fall to less than $1.
People and institutions will pay monthly subscription fees to
software-service providers instead of purchasing software or software
licenses, as is the common practice of institutions today."
'creating computers that have common-sense intelligence is impossible in the
foreseeable future,"
"Nor can distance education, mediated by computers and computer networks,
substitute for a traditional education, he added. "Don't forget the impact
that love has on education," said Mr. Dertouzos, a native of Greece, as he
explained what distance education lacks. "If you are loved by your
teacher -- and I mean this in the most innocent and Platonic sense -- if
your teacher really cares for your well-being -- and you know that because
your teacher will ask about you, will scold you for not doing the right
thing, and will give you stories about why you should do this or do that --
the learning can be unbelievably different."
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Mg-Ed-Dv invites information on interesting Mgt Ed articles & books