For years, out of necessity, the LAN has connected individual computers to a central server. You d better get on. So you ve got a bunch of computers connected to each other, rather than through a network. Distributed computing is the first model and, at the moment, perhaps the least applicable to learning. One example of this model s power, says Jim Madsen, president and CEO, is a recent agreement with the National Science Foundation and the Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure to provide 200 million hours for research scientists who normally have to wait months for supercomputing time.
People generate valuable content in projects that they work on.
If anyone across my whole organization has some of that wonderful content, I could take a search engine like Napster and find it. It allows an instructor to remotely set up a drive for a student project, says Scott Davis, Mangosoft s chief technology officer. Students can post drafts remotely, and instructors and other students can mark them up or make comments. Groove, too, allows for collaborative work. Let s say you re teaching an online course in international law.