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TUESDAY 3RD JULY - NEWSLETTER
Chair of Questnet 2001: a network odyssey is Wilber Williams. So who better to ask a few questions on the first day of the conference. QUESTnet 2001: a space odyssey….please explain.
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Well, it comes from the movie 2001: Space Odyssey…so being the year it is we just HAD to use it but to correlate, this conference is all about predictions and dealing with the rapid changes in technology. In the last few years, we've had very slow networks that are quite underdeveloped and fairly complex and diverse yet come another five to ten years, we really don't know where we'll be. We know it's going to be a thousand times faster, sure, but considering things are changing very rapidly in this area I think this conference will address our concerns and help prepare us for the future. What can all of us expect this week? There's going to be a lot of good papers from people telling us about where they're at and/or where they're heading but also it's a great opportunity for people to meet up and network and see what other people are doing in the field and hear about ways to improve education through technology that they may not have heard of.
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Professor Alex Hills is Distinguished Professor of Engineering, Public Policy and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. He survived another Pacific Ocean crossing to visit the Gold Coast for the first time and be a keynoter speaker at QUESTnet, 2001. We cornered a jet-lagged Professor Hills at the cocktail party last night to find out more about "Wireless Andrew".
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What has been the response by teachers and students? Well the instructors all want the technology, and many of them are incorporating the web itself within the lecture yet I say to them: "Be careful what you wish for, because those students on their mobile PCs are not necessarily taking notes, they're passing notes, if you know what I mean". But all jokes aside, even though it is voluntary to have the mobile computers, of the 7000 students, at least half are equipped with wireless notebooks. What about interest from other universities and industry peers? We get about five universities a week come see us. As for peers, well we received Yahoo magazine's Number One rating for the award for most wired university, but the irony there is that the campus network is a wireless one! Where do you see the future for Education and Technology? It's all going to come down to speed. At the moment in a lot of wireless technology the Internet is more like the "World Wide Wait".
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