Original_To:  BITNET%"mbu-l@ttuvm1"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Wed, 15 Apr 1992 16:32:00 CDT
From:         Fred Kemp <YKFYY@TTACS.BITNET>
Subject:      Distance Interchange

Dickie, Bill:  I hear from techies that putting interchange
over Internet (since it is simply a file swapping operation)
SHOULD be no problem, but I don't know how to do it, nor do
my people here know how to do it.  I have a good relation
with Dimitri Koroharis of ASPECTS, and he says (or said in
the CCCC pre-conference workshop) that ASPECTS will soon be
operational over Internet.  But he's not a techie and
couldn't tell me how that works.  So there's probably a way
to port Interchange over the Internet, but none of us who
use it have the time to dink out the problems.

The Shiva netserial approach Mark and Jeff used at NYIT
(although one was in Michigan and the other in Florida) was
quite satisfactory, if one neglects the cost of the long-
distance line.  There was easily an eight-to-twelve second
delay between a send command and the message appearing in
the text stream, but that's relatively unimportant since the
"real-time" part of the program is much less important that
the chronological appearance of messages in the text stream.
That is, who cares how much time elapses between "send" and
"see," since the sender is the only one who notices?  Others
are seeing comments appear and are responding accordingly,
regardless of whether there is a one-second or ten-second
delay.

All that was required in the NYIT experiment was a Shiva
netserial modem (9600 bps) and a telephone line.  The shiva
box plugs into the telephone port on one of the units on the
LAN.  (This is all Macintosh, of course.)  The experiment at
NYIT had no students at any station, just Mark, Jeff, and
me.  But my understanding is that Mark and Jeff have had
students sharing.  That means that Mark's LAN and Jeff's LAN
have communicated with the same dynamic (if not the same
speed) as a single LAN running Interchange.

Michael Joyce at CCCC mentioned twice, once in the pre-
conference workshop and again in a hallway to me and Bill
Condon, that there really may not be a reason for classrooms
to interact this way, either through a wall or across the
country.  Trust Michael to come up with something shocking.
I don't mind rethinking my assumptions; that's always a
healthy thing to do.  But I can't escape the feeling that
having students write (publish) to a variety of readers is a
very good thing for the writers, and the glitz of distance
ENFI simply supports the motivational aspects of it all.

In a nutshell:  writers need readers.  "Real" writers write
to distant, unknown readers.  That's what we model when we
do distant ENFI and file-sharing and so forth.  Besides, the
students love it.

Eric, the "chat" on VAX is (from my experiences) clumsy and
has that darn keystroke deliver thing, which is terribly
inhibiting to novices.  The chat on my VAX allows only six
users, and there's no transcript.  In this regard, a
distance Interchange is a real improvement.  Fred


I just read Rob Royar's message regarding the shiva speed.  He is
much more technically adept than I am, so maybe the transfer
wasn't as slow as I said above.  Seemed slow to me, but not so as
to subvert the pedagogy (as I said).  Fred
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