Communications of the ACM articles from April 1996

Communications of the ACM archives from April 1996

Can kiwis fly? Computing in New Zealand. (includes key facts and figures on New Zealand)(International Perspectives)
April 1, 1996... How did the America's Cup come to be won, and won so convincingly, by Team New Zealand in 1995? The event requires a combination of the best yachting technology and sailing skills in the world. For a remote country of 3.5 million people to...

The next generation in human-computer interaction. (learning-centered design)(Log On Education)
April 1, 1996... Today, the dominant framework for interface development is User-Centered Design (UCD). As first crystallized in 1986, in the seminal book User (:entered System Design, by Don Norman and Steven Draper, the needs and capabilities of users ought...

Learner-centered education.
April 1, 1996... A revolution is taking place in education, one that deals with the philosophy of how one teaches, of the relationship between teacher and student, of the way in which a classroom is structured, and the nature of curriculum. At the heart is a...

A goal-based scenario for high school students.
April 1, 1996... Many commercial and academic developers of educational multimedia have focused primarily on information access and presentation. However, while it is easy to see that multimedia has tremendous potential to enhance the vividness with which...

Intelligent multimedia tutoring systems.
April 1, 1996... We have used advanced technology, including intelligent modeling of the domain and the presumed knowledge of students, to build intelligent multimedia tutoring systems. Simulations, animations, sound, and video are also used to keep students...

The Collaboratory Notebook.
April 1, 1996... The recent explosive growth of networking raises the possibility of widespread collaborative, open-ended learning activities. This vision is supported by research highlighting the value of both collaboration and open-ended activities for...

Key to the information highway. (Knowledge Integration Environment)
April 1, 1996... Internet users encounter contradictory, disconnected, current, and controversial information. Students who learn to use tints complex resource for advancing their science knowledge could have a lifelong learning partner. But students need a...

Student communities for the advancement of knowledge. (computer-supported intentional learning environments)
April 1, 1996... Knowledge building--the creation of knowledge as a social product--is something that scientists, scholars, and employees of highly innovative companies do for a living. It could also be a significant activity of schools, though it is rarely...

Software by kids for kids.
April 1, 1996... For many children today, their first interaction with technology is at home playing video games. The number of hours spent in front of these screens must be in the order of hundreds of billions. While many researchers, parents, and educators...

Making learning a part of life. (the Center for LifeLong Learning and Design's concept of design)
April 1, 1996... We must reconceptualize our educational system. By emphasizing learning as a new form of labor and by acknowledging coverage is impossible and obsolescence is unavoidable, new educational strategies such as integration of working and learning...

Computer support for learning through complex problem solving.
April 1, 1996... Typical back-of-the-chapter problems don't provide students with the context to make the problems motivating and to facilitate transfer (use of the knowledge in other situations). Authentic problems-- problems that are real, that might arise in...

Scaffolded examples for learning object-oriented design.
April 1, 1996... An experienced software developer can easily learn the syntax of a particular object-oriented language, but learning to deploy these languages in effective design structures is a challenge. Part of this is simply that design "is hard. But part...

A learner-centered tool for students building models. (Model-It)
April 1, 1996... At the heart of a working science literacy is the ability to create models that explain real-world phenomena. Just as professional scientists rely on technology for their modeling activities, students, too, can benefit from using computers to...

Group communication.
April 1, 1996... Groups are ubiquitous in human society. We often use collective names for groups of people as a convenient means for referring to or addressing some part of the population as if it were a single entity, like a school class, an age group, or a...

Totem: a fault-tolerant multicast group communication system. (includes related articles)(Group Communication)
April 1, 1996... Delivering multicast messages, Totem invokes operations in the same total order throughout the distributed system. The result: consistency of replicated data and simplified programming of applications. Many applications can benefit from...

The Transis approach to high availability cluster communication. (includes related articles)(Group Communication)
April 1, 1996... A unique large-scale multicast service designed for partitionable operation is examined here. In the local elections system of the municipality of "Wiredville",(1) several computers were used to establish an electronic town hall. The...

Distributing trust with the Rampart toolkit. (group communication protocols)(Group Communication)
April 1, 1996... The Rampart group communication protocols are designed to distribute trust among a group of nodes in a distributed system--so while individual nodes need not be fully trusted, the group can be. Many mechanisms for enforcing security policy in...

Horus: a flexible group communication system. (includes related article on the Horus microprotocols)(Group Communication)
April 1, 1996... An innovative system offering applicatiion developers an extensively flexible group communication model is described. The emergence of process-group environments for distributed computing represents a promising step toward robustness for...

From group communication to transactions in distributed systems.(Group Communication)
April 1, 1996... Because toolkits for developing process groups do not allow applications to issue reliable multicasts to multiple groups, a new development model distinguishing between groups as logical addressing mechanisms and reliable communication primitives...

Synchronous and asynchronous group communication.(Group Communication)
April 1, 1996... How can synchronous and asynchronous group communication services be integrated and understood in a common framework? Experience with group communication in a complex system for air traffic control suggests one viable approach. In...