[1072] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: New Issues (was: Flaming at Abernathy)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steve Cisler)
Wed Jul 24 13:35:34 1991
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 91 10:25:41 -0700
From: Steve Cisler <sac@apple.com>
To: HABEGGER_J@bronze.colorado.edu, com-priv@psi.com, willis@cs.tamu.edu
Willis Marti asks what to tell librarians, teachers, and small
businesspeople about the Internet.
I have been doing about one presentation every two months, and they
last from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on the forum. My
audiences have been hackers, medical librarians, public librarians,
librarians in W. Pennsylvania , MD, and WVA; special librarians
and information brokers.
I use a HyperCard format to present the issues , the history, and the
current uses of the network. Up to now, I have not had an Internet
connection during a talk so I use MediaTracks 'tapes' to show ftp,
mail, Usenet, library catalogs, and the WAIS (Wide Area Information
Server) project. They look like an actual connection, but you can
pause, reverse, and annotate the sessions.
Because the audience and the issues change every month, I try to keep
the most recent info on NREN bills in my talk, and I usually hand out
a disk full of relevant text files for those who want to know about the
Net communties and issues.
I have been adding more information about how one actually hooks
up to the network. That varies with the affiliation and location of
the audience.
This brings me back to Rick Adams hope that users will receive
support to make their own decisions about how they hook up.
Judging from the interest by a very disparate bunch of people, how
would you screen users if you were the funding agency? I think the
definition of 'user' or even 'researcher' should be very broad, but that
could cause problems to a state or federal funding agency whose focus
might be somewhat more narrow.
Steve Cisler
Apple Library
sac@apple.com
