Apple Technology Review, Fall 1997: Overview

With this issue, Apple Technology Review returns with a new format and a new, wider readership. We are now publishing online and print versions on a quarterly basis, available both to our familiar internal Apple readership and to customers, researchers, and developers. The online version is publicly available over the Web at http://www.research.apple.com/ATReview.

Our new quarterly format expands to include two main articles, as well as Spotlight articles, Essays, Book Reviews, and Trip or Conference Reports of interest to Apple's broader research community.

The first main article this month is by Bonnie Nardi, Brian Reilly, and Reinhold Steinbeck. They report on their experience designing and conducting an online digital photography course for high school teachers. The aim of the course is to enable the teachers to incorporate the new photography technology into their classrooms effectively. The project combines the challenges of how best to take advantage of the new technology and, how to build a distance learning community.

Ted Olsson's article, "Students With eMates Take to the Field," provides a look at how eMate, along with Knowledge Revolution's eProbes, gives students a chance to learn outside the classroom, conducting experiments in the field. Ted gives special attention to how these two new technologies can help focus attention away from themselves and more toward the context-driven learning activities themselves and to the contribution the eMate and eProbe combination makes to project-based learning methods.

Our regular features include a Spotlight article by Chris Burmester about his work with Steve Roberts of Nomadic Research Labs, equipping Steve's sailboat with Newton-controlled onboard systems. Newton devices provide mobile controls and monitors for a general shipboard control system, demonstrating Newton's ability to situate itself within a wider context of devices and connections. Dan Russell's essay on "Searching the WWW" offers some hints and rules of thumb for finding useful information on the web without all the dead ends and retries familiar to most of us. And Mike Graves contributes a review of Bruno Latour's unconventional study on the nature of technology research and development, Aramis.

Steve Cisler and Janet Vratny report on two international conferences. Steve participated in the "First European Conference on Community Networking" in Milan during the first week of July. Steve tells about some impressive community networking projects throughout Europe and some of the issues involved in uniting community-building efforts under a common organization. Janet represented Apple at the INET '97 conference in Kuala Lumpur. Her report emphasizes the goals of the Internet Society, especially as they play out in educational and information access domains, and Malaysia's ambitious plans for a "Multimedia Super Corridor."

If you are reading the Apple Technology Review online, you also have the chance to try out a couple of new technologies being developed in ATG. While reading each article, you will be able to access an automatically generated list of suggested articles of related interest elsewhere on the Web. Each article also has an "in-context" discussion area, to which you may add your own comments. This work comes from ATG's Learning Communities Group project in contextual learning. The project's goal is to incorporate learning opportunities into everyday situations and tasks.

Mike Graves