Important Note: The DELTA project is in "hiatus." It may be revived as part of an on-line Telecommunications class in the Fall 1995 semester (see http://gozer.idbsu.edu/business/is380/syllabus.html for an example of some on-line materials from the Fall 1994 semester).

Select any of the items below if you would like to jump directly to that section of this document. Those with appropriate graphical icons were at least partially updated on October 1, 1994--those with "under construction" icons are yet to be updated.

DELTA goals
About DELTA, WWW, & Mosaic
Courseware and tutorials
List servers
Sharing presentation materials
USENET news groups
Business resources
Other Resource Collections
The reference shelf

Further information

DELTA goals

This project is intended as a demonstration vehicle to show how information useful for teaching and learning about business telecommunications and data communications may be effectively shared over the Internet. It is expected to go through successive phases of growing by accretion and restructuring over time. Materials such as the following might be collaboratively provided, shared, and used by authors, instructors, and students worldwide :

• Tutorials
• Case studies
• Presentation materials
• Computer-based training
• Multimedia supplements (graphics, audio, and motion video)
• Archives from list servers and other sources
• Student projects
• Reading lists
• Test banks
• Reference materials
• Gateways to Gopher, FTP, USENET, Telnet, and other Internet services

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About DELTA, WWW, & Mosaic

DELTA materials are designed to be shared over the Internet using the World-Wide Web (WWW) with a hypermedia viewer/user interface such as Mosaic. This involves a distributed system of WWW servers using the HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP), with individual documents prepared using the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Mosaic has extraordinary potential as a distrubuted multimedia knowledge management environment for a number of reasons, including:

1. Mosaic "client" software is available for X, Macintosh, and MS-Windows

2. WWW documents may be accessed from local disks, LAN disks, or over the Internet

3. WWW documents may include sound, graphics, motion video, and other information forms

4. In addition to the WWW, Mosaic can also coordinate access to Gopher, USENET, FTP, etc.--"one-stop shopping"

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois (the organization responsible for developing Mosaic) is an excellent starting place to explore and learn more about the WWW and Mosaic. The NCSA Mosaic Home Page is a central hub, while the NCSA WinMosaic Home Page leads to information about the Microsoft Windows version of Mosaic. The NCSA Mosaic Demo Document contains a large number of impressive demonstrations, and the What's New With NCSA Mosaic document is a good way to keep up on the latest developments.

John December maintains an Internet Resources Index, Information Sources Guide, and Internet Tools Summary which link to huge collections of resources.

A Beginner's Guide to HTML is available which will help you to create your own documents using the HyperText Markup Language, as are more complete HTML Specifications.

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Courseware and tutorials

This semester I am experimenting with an online IS380 Telecommunications class syllabus, taught in the College of Business of Boise State University.

Chris Johnson has put some materials for his Open Systems course on the WWW.

Greg Jackson from MIT has an Article on Academic Privacy and related issues. There is also a Collection of Articles on Electronic Privacy Issues.

The Globewide Network Academy has a Collaborative Hyptertext Textbook Project, including a pilot Internet Class Text. A working group of GNA is currently designing a GNA Internet curriculum document, available by FTP (ftp.desy.de/pub/uu-gna/curriculum.txt).

Neal Holtz of Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) reported to the www-courseware list an example of how computer-based training (CBT) can be facilitated through WWW on the Internet. He provides documentation, including examples of exam questions and answers. An approach like this could possibly be used to create distributed CBT and test bank materials for telecommunications.

There are several on-line tutorials for the Internet itself--one popular one which has been "hypertextized" is The Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet.

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List servers

The NetEd-L list was "created for teachers of data communications and telecommunications at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, primarily in business schools" by Ray Panko at the University of Hawaii. To subscribe to the list, send a message to maiser@busadm.cba.hawaii.edu with the body:

subscribe neted-l

A WWW courseware list was established by Kevin Hughes of Enterprise Integration Technologies as an outgrowth of a Birds-of-a-Feather meeting at the Hypertext '93 conference. To subscribe, send mail to www-courseware-request@eit.com with the body:

subscribe (your email address)

Archives for the WWW courseware list are available in hypertext format (naturally!)

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Sharing presentation materials

Mosaic will pipe incoming files to the "viewers" or applications you specify. This can be useful for sharing classroom presentation materials such as PowerPoint slides. For example, Windows Mosaic can be configured to automatically pipe incoming slides to the PowerPoint viewer, which will display them and return to Mosaic upon exit from the slide show.

A sample of PowerPoint slides is already available for use. Additional contributions are encouraged! Materials created using other presentation software, and their related viewers (if freely distributable), might also be added in the future.

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USENET news groups

There are many USENET news groups which relate to telecommunications. About two dozen, which may be accessed from within Mosaic, are listed here.

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Business resources

• AT&T and Bell Laboratories
• ATM Forum
• Bellcore, including National ISDN
• Bell System
• Cisco Systems, Inc., including their Educational Archive
• Commerce Net
• Consensus Development Corporation
• Hewlett Packard
• Internet Shopping Network
• KDD Labs Overseas Communications
• Networking Industry Associations
• Novell
• Pacific Bell, including ISDN information
• PC Magazine
• PSI
• Rockwell (network systems papers)
• RSA Data Security, Inc.
• US West
• WilTel

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Other Resource Collections

• ISDN, Dan Kegel
• (Tele) Communications Information Sources
• Telecom Archives, MIT
• Telecomm Research, Columbia U Center for
• Telecommunications and Information Sciences, University of Kansas Laboratory of
• Networking-related WWW resources

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The reference shelf

Alphabet soup starting to get to you? The World Wide Web Acronym Server has more than 12,000 acronyms listed and defined. Try to find the acronym with the most valid computing-related definitions--ATM has three!

There is an annotated bibliography of telecommunications research which is searchable by keyword, & contains some article abstracts.

There's also the Dictionary of Computing.

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Further information

Last modified October 1, 1994.

Acknowledgement: Thomas I. M. Ho has made numerous suggestions and contributions which have been incorporated into this project. Thanks, Tom!

Please send any comments, additions, proposed new links, and suggestions to the address below:

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