Telecommunications Research in the United States and Selected Foreign Countries: a Preliminary Survey. Report to the National Science Foundation (1973) / Chapter Skim
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TERMINALS, SENSORS AND DISPLAYS
TERMINALS, SENSORS AND DISPLAYS
Pages 79-102
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From page 79... ...
79 COMPUTER TERMINALS I Introduction The computer terminal provides the interface between a person at one point in a telecommunications network and a computer at another.
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From page 80... ...
is certain to have a profound effect upon the nature of computer terminals. It has been predicted that it will soon be possible to include on a single chip the entire circuitry of a computer more powerful than those which only recently sold for as much as a million dollars, and that the manufacturing cost of such a chip may be less than that of a typewriter.
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From page 81... ...
As an example of the use of the coupler, the writer of a letter might, after completing it, telephone the post office and send the letter to the recipient's "mail box." This would be a data bank where it would remain until the recipient chooses to use his own electronic writing machine to "look in his mail box." Such mail may become the first class mail of the future, with present air mail being relegated to second-class status. As well as being faster, electronic mail of this kind may ultimately be less costly than physically moving printed documents.
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From page 82... ...
It has been observed that Lloyds of London did much to offset an otherwise negative trade balance for England for many years. In each case in which the United States takes the leadership in establishing a fundamental data bank useful to the world as a whole, it will be taking a step toward leadership in that field for many years to come.
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From page 83... ...
3) Do computer terminals need both capital and lower case letters?
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From page 84... ...
W Dunwell IBM Corporation Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
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From page 85... ...
II. Social Environment of Education Since the changes which are taking place in education are largely in response to changes in society, our consideration of the use of computer terminals and communications will commence with an examination of the social environment of education.
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From page 86... ...
From then until now time has been one of the principal measures of learning. Nearly all educational institutions establish a fixed period, the semester or term, within which each course must fit, regardless of the nature of its material.
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From page 87... ...
D Education as a Life-Long Process At an earlier time when the rate of social and economic change and the scope and rate of growth of human knowledge were less, it was possible to educate young people with the reasonable probability that the knowledge imparted would be appropriate and sufficient to their use for the remainder of their lives.
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From page 88... ...
Bringing students together in large numbers in this way has forced schools to enlarge the scope of the services which they provide to include services unrelated to education. There are public school districts within New York State which operate over one hundred buses, many times the number of buses available to serve the general population in the same area.
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From page 89... ...
There are boundaries beyond which only the real world and society at large can serve as teachers. In general schools are surrogates for real life, institutions which make learning easier by bringing together in convenient proximity people and materials conducive to learning and provide an environment free of distractions.
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From page 90... ...
The time required for activities of this sort will become available in several ways. In part, it may be obtained by using new teaching techniques such as Computer-Assisted Instruction to improve learning efficiency.
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From page 91... ...
At the primary school level, students may continue to spend about as much time in school as they do today because of the extent to which primary schools are relied upon for social conditioning and as daytime foster parents for our children. However, as children grow older and become more responsible for themselves they may spend less and less learning time in school and more such time studying at home, at neighborhood learning centers, or elsewhere in the community.
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From page 92... ...
Similarly, the ability to certify competency in this way depends upon being able to test exhaustively an individual's mastery of a subject. Computer terminals can be of great assistance in this, since they make it possible to test much more thoroughly and accurately than is possible using present manual testing methods.
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From page 93... ...
G Remote Reference to a Library Catalog It may be possible for a student to interrogate a library catalog from a computer terminal in his home.
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I Computer Document Editing A computer terminal can be a very useful tool in the preparation of texts, reports, student essays and documents of many kinds.
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From page 95... ...
A typical course may employ several media appropriate to its goals. In addition to lectures and books, on which many courses place exclusive reliance today, a course may employ videophone classes, films, videotapes or lectures on cablevision, computer-assisted instruction, video reference to information in the library, and use of computer terminals for computation, data retrieval and document preparation.
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From page 96... ...
IV. The Future Form and Function of Educational Institutions The new teaching media may bring about major changes in the form and function of colleges and universities and somewhat less change in primary and secondary schools.
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From page 97... ...
Once electronics has been introduced into the typewriter, it will cost very little more to add memory, the ability to compute and execute computer programs, and the facilities to communicate over telephone lines with other computers and data banks. The typewriter is about to become a computer in its own right able to perform extensive and complex computations.
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From page 98... ...
In addition, they should be capable of being connected to the video classroom facilities of a number of educational institutions to permit students to participate in a wide selection of courses of this kind. The learning center would provide one or more computer terminals.
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From page 99... ...
The libraries of educational institutions may be used primarily as repositories for old books and for publications in common demand. In order to make an electronic library practical, it will be necessary to have a means for storing data at very low cost which at the same time permits rapid automatic retrieval.
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From page 100... ...
While certain data banks will be maintained by educational institutions, many will be managed by consortia, and others will be national or international in nature. As an example, a single data bank might serve to store vast amounts of information relating to a class of plants or animals.
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From page 101... ...
Because of its cost, video classroom service is not likely to be commonly available in home learning centers for some time. The cost per user diminishes considerably for neighborhood learning centers, since a number of users presumably could share a single circuit to an educational institution.
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From page 102... ...
Reduction in the amount of travel needed to study, elimination of the need to sit through class discussions of material that one already understands, access to vast libraries of information, the ability to share in videoclass discussion with people scattered over a wide geographical area, access to data banks and large computers can all serve to provide a better education and at the same time allow the student to do more on his own.
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