These announcements come at a time when the role of the Internet in education has garnered increased attention from local, state, and national sources, all of whom raced to distribute the Internet-related distance education findings of a sociology class at California State University, Northridge. All three software companies, whose recent announcements appear below, acknowledge that their products will now have the potential to become powerful distance education tools. Technorhetorician Dr. Peter Sands uses writing software in his composition classes at the University of Maine, Presque Isle and conducts faculty development workshops in his role as an Epiphany Project leader. He notes This may be the most exciting development in groupware for writing instruction since the birth of the Internet. At every workshop I conduct, every meeting with other teachers and every conference, people ask if they can use these programs at a distance, and their frustration is visible when they find out they can't.
Students expect it and teachers can use it.
CommonSpace CommonSpace and the Internet Sixth Floor Media has always been committed to the Internet as a platform for education. From its first release in March of 1996, CommonSpace's real-time conferencing was not restricted to isolated labs and LANs but has taken advantage of the Internet to bring people together regardless of location. Today, the World Wide Web is becoming the preferred Internet platform for publishing, information access, and collaborative work. CommonSpace version 2.0, due out this summer, will incorporate tools to read and display HTML and to include hyperlinks to websites. By combining these tools, students will be able to access and annotate any document located anywhere on the web.