🚀 go-pugleaf

In May, 1992, Terry Anderson wrote:

To give you a short history, the idea for this project arose upon 
my return from the XV World Congress of ICDE in Caracas in 1990. 
Having realized that as a newly impoverished grad student, I would 
not likely be able to afford to travel to Bangkok, I began thinking 
of alternate ways to participate. I approached CompuServe, Genie and 
some of the large information utilities regarding sponsorship, but 
soon realized that the costs would be prohibitive. I then began 
"discovering" the InterNet and realized that a distributed
conference would be cost effective and probably workable.

I then began a long set of discussions with Robin Mason, from the 
Open University, Morten Paulson from DEOS, Dave Godfrey from 
Softwords-CoSy and assorted other distance educators. We approached 
ICDE, who thought it was a great idea, but of course they had no 
funding. The Congress Program Chair, Bruce Scriven has however been 
encouraging and we moved forward. The Congress Organizing Committee 
in Bangkok managed to get 10 terminals and printers from IBM Thailand 
for use at the Conference and Softwords has volunteered to set
up a Unix machine and CoSy conferencing system in Bangkok, for the 
actual Congress.

Robin managed to twist the arms of some very impressive scholars to 
be "first speakers", Dave Godfrey has volunteered to coordinate the 
Bankgkok site, and I'm looking after "porting" and distribution.

INTRODUCTION: International Council for Distance Education Computer
     Conference (ICDECC) is an experimental project designed effort
     to link distance educators and students from across the globe
     in an interactive discussion related to the themes of the XVI
     World Congress on Distance Education.  The project is also
     intended as a demonstration project and an invitation to new
     users to participate in global computer conferencing. The key
     innovation of the project is the use of human "porters" to
     distribute, filter and format comments between a large number
     of sites, networks and mailing lists.

CONCLUSION: ICDECC will be a global experience uniting, in
     electronic space, distance educators from around the globe.
     For many the experience will be their first exposure to
     electronic networking.  The contribution of distance educators
     as participants and porters will insure that the experience
     profits each of us.
 



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uucp: uunet!m2xenix!puddle!23!Janet.Murray
Internet: Janet.Murray@f23.n105.z1.fidonet.org