--- Forwarded Message from Otmar K. E. Foelsche, llti-editor ---


>I do have a question, however, about how student input or
student interaction works in these environments. When a publisher's tape
is made available in QT3, how is student input handled? Is it recorded
and stored on the individual machine's hard drive, can it be written to
the server and easily played back, similar to a regular lab environment?
Can the recording easily include the master track with the student's
voice? Are these sorts of activities what you were referring to when you
spoke of the "lab" being "a production point, delivery point, and
testing point"? I probably got confused when you referred to the "lab",
which I understand you to mean as the turn-key type system (analog or
digital) which most of us have today.>

Student input can be handled in various ways. Harvard University has a system that permits student input and playback of master track and student input simultaneously. With the amount of local disk space and server space constantly increasing, it may be a cleaner solution to record master track and student track on the user's lab machine and provide the option at the end of a session to discard the session or to store it in compressed format on a server. At Dartmouth we are looking at these and other options - but have not yet decided which way to go. Our students and faculty are not terribly interested in recording themselves (a recent survey of about 210 students found the digital services adequate - even without the capability of recording themselves).

Interactivity with digital media can be produced in various ways - many programs allow the use of digital media in conjuntion with writing, fill-in, and multiple choice type of activities. 

The traditional lab will probably become a physical space in which traditional services will co-exist for a while with innovative services. Traditional services have to be made available until digital services can be made "fault-tolerant" at a lower cost than today. Turnkey systems definitely have a place here. Experimental/development/research oriented environments are equally important. The lab itself will reflect upon each institution's requirements as well as its available resources. Turnkey systems  may become a cost-effective solution for delivering language support once they, too, can get away from platform based hardware and become truly networkable. Delivery of services will have to be via platform compatible browsers - unless there is something better down the road. Most important is the consistency and reliability of provided services to all users at all times......

I hope this addresses at least some of he issues raised in the inquiry.

Otmar Foelsche