"Are Daedalus and Commonspace Dead?"
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This e-mail message was originally posted by Fred Kemp and is now copied in its original form from the acw-l archives.

As usual, I agree with Todd, especially when he so generously agrees with me.

>However, I would not make the same choice today because our campus'
>immediate and long-term future requires us to think in terms of web-based
>instructional tools, not LAN-based ones. A week ago today on the WPA-L
>list, Fred Kemp himself wrote, "computer-based classrooms have reached
>their peak as a concept," suggesting that LAN-based approaches are dying
>or dead.

The Web is all. The new server-side and client-side web capabilities can duplicate almost anything that a LAN program can do, and the advantages of cross-platform performance and unified browser interface (mostly) make well developed web capabilities much more useful. Kids come to school already saturated in web browsing. The old training issues are withering away.

BUT, Todd also says

>The bottom line, though, for folks like Judith, I think, is that DIWE and
>CS might make good sense for the time being.

There are many, many reasons why LAN-based writing support software still makes sense for some people. I think such software has another five years of useful life, if a dwindling market.

>It's a painful moment for me to feel thatit's now time for the professional community in and around ACW-L to
>consider the question: "Are Daedalus and CommonSpace are dead?" Perhaps
>Fred or the folks from SixthFloor can fly in and declare that all will be
>made well soon with new versions. That would be a relief.

Well, "dead" in the sense of the exploratory community. There's not a lot more to be learned from such software, although that certainly wasn't true from 1986 (when proto-DIWE was born) to 1996 (when the Web sat up and roared).

But, again, it will be several years before anything as solid and as easily learned comes along. WebCT and SyllaBase and Etudes and others (see the ACW pages for links to these and other interesting web-based programs http://english.ttu.edu/acw) are, in terms of clearly productive software, something like the creatures in the pods in _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ (original version, of course). Smooth and soulless. DIWE has instructional grit. I'll bet Daedalus has something of the same quality up its sleeve for the Web.

See what Texas Tech is doing along these lines. Click on http://english.ttu.edu:5555 and log on as a student in my English 0000-000 and take the TOPIC/Web tour. TOPIC/Web is not as slick as some, but in my opinion instructionally more potent, or more potentially instructional, or....it's certainly a lot of fun to program.

Fred Kemp
f.kemp@ttu.edu

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vol. 4 Iss. 1 Fall 1999