Slide 1:
Hello again and welcome to lecture number 8 in COM 333 - Communicating through Internet.  Today’s topic is “Real Time Communication” on the Internet.

Slide 2:
There are several modes of live communication - let’s begin with the simplest and perhaps the most effective.  Text, that is.  Simply typing and sending messages in real time back and forth between two sites is a very effective way of live communication through the Internet.  It has the feature of being very fast.  You are sending a very tiny amount of data from one location to another - far less than would be sent in a, let’s say, in a web page or perhaps even in an email, because it doesn’t require a lot of the header information.  So it’s very fast, it requires very little bandwidth, and it can be quite effective, especially if you refine your typing skills.  And if you use emoticons it can be somewhat enhanced.  Emoticons are the use of characters to emulate smiles and frowns and other nonverbal communication.  You’ll see those created with perhaps a colon, a dash, and a right parenthesis, and if you look at that on the screen, put your head on your left shoulder, it appears to be a little smiley face.  In any event, this wide textual communication is a very effective one.  Then there’s audio, what we’re doing now in a sense, although this is not live, but to send audio from one location to another.  This does require a higher bandwidth.  Although relatively modest, compared to video.  If you are providing a live audio feed from one location to another, it generally takes several seconds to buffer, that is, to start up the presentation, and so it takes a little while to get going and so there is somewhat of a delay there, and there’s a delay usually in exchanges between one person speaking and the other person speaking.  So it can be effective and it adds all kinds of emphasis and hesitation and other pieces of communication that we take for granted in face to face.  Well, then, providing video and audio simultaneously live over the Internet is a high bandwidth communication mode.  That is it takes a lot of space.  You are sending lots and lots of bits and bites of information and it’s at a relatively slow frame rate.  By that, I mean you’ll send a series of still images, and for example, when we watch television we’re seeing 30 flow images every second, and so while they are still images, they all blend together in our eyes and to our mind it appears to be a motion image.  While using the Internet, one commonly will get 4 or perhaps 5 frames per second, if you are lucky, and so the image is a little bit jerky, and depending upon traffic on the Internet, it might freeze up all together.

Slide 3:
Well, let’s talk a little about the first mode - text.  Some examples are the AOL Instant Messenger or IM; it’s a very popular tool.  It’s one that I do use and you have seen my log on for IM as RaySchroed.  Another example of this kind of communication is the WebBoard chat room; when you go to WebBoard this time, you might notice up on the tool bar that you can click and chat if someone else is around, and if they also enter the chat room at the same time, you’ll be able to have a live communication.  You could even post a message on our WebBoard inviting others to meet you on what ever evening or daytime hour and conduct a live chat, so that you can talk about the class and talk about the instructor.  Well, Internet Relay Chat has perhaps the largest amount of these kinds of chat rooms, and it’s been around for a long time on the Internet, and we’ll talk a little more about that.  Yahoo chat rooms also are examples of this kind of chat.  They are very simple to do.  They are very fast, and they have low bandwidth.

Slide 4:
On IM and WebBoard chat – well, IM is not available just to those who use AOL.  In fact, it’s bundled now with Netscape Communicator, so if you download the Communicator it comes right with it.  The original IM or instant messenger allowed one-to-one communication, so two people could chat one to another.  More recent editions allows for multiple user , so that 4, 5, 7, 20, however many people can chat simultaneously in the same unique room.  Now that room goes away, so to speak, when everybody logs out.  But it’s there for you anytime you want to log on.  And the neat thing about IM is that once you’ve established a screen name and your friends or colleagues have established a screen name, you see mine there, RaySchroed (there’s a limit of 10 characters so we’ve forgotten the last “er”), but in any event you can install IM on your machine and then add me as a buddy and anytime that I’m logged on and have activated my instant messenger, you will see that I’m on the network and all you have to do is click on me, click on my screen name, and it will ring me up, and I’ll chat with you -- so it’s a very user friendly - a quite simple system that’s very effective.  Now the WebBoard chat room is great for those of us enrolled in this class.  Once you’ve logged onto the WebBoard, up at the top of the screen on the menu bar, you can click on chat and this will allow you to enter a chat room for the class -- if someone else is there at that moment, you’ll be able to communicate one-to-another and you can hold live discussions.  So far in this class we haven’t done that.  One of the advantages of asynchronous learning of these web-based classes is that we don’t have to get together at the same time, but occasionally events will occur such that a group of students or a faculty member might want to meet with a group of students and hold live discussions - so this is available to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and if you wish, you can post a note inviting others to meet you at a given date and at a given time in the chat room if you want to talk to some other people from the class.

Slide 5:
Internet Relay Chat.  Well, IRC actually pre-dates the World Wide Web and it’s been around for quite some time.  It gained it’s fame early on for it’s use in emergencies -  that is, in cases, oh gosh, that were coups in the former Soviet Union -- when those occurred, IRC was one of the only modes of communication to get word to the outside world.  But over time, IRC has become known more so as the shady side of the Internet.  The Internet Relay Chat involves thousands of channels for live chatting, and anyone may set up a channel and the channel exists as long as someone resides there, as long as someone’s logged onto the channel.  There are many of these channels are sexually explicit.  They deal with all kinds of aberrations in society and certainly mainstream as well, but it seems to tend more toward the fringes of what we find generally socially acceptable.  Pedophiles are known to use these channels to entice younger persons into encounters, etc.  And so IRC has gained a rather shady reputation.  But some channels are quite valuable.  Undernet, for example provides live chats occasionally with scientists, astronomers, engineers, philosophers, etc., and live international chats are held on certain chat channels.  And there certainly are academic uses for Internet Relay Chat.  It’s a wonderful tool, but it’s one that has been used, at least publicized, more for those kinds of fringe activities.

Slide 6:
Well, other chat.  There are enhanced chat sites out there that use avitars.  Avitars are commonly animated representations of an individual.  It could be a picture, or it could be a caricature or a cartoon figure that will appear on the screen and appear to communicate with you so that when your typing, using the chat, this animated image becomes or portrays the person with whom you are chatting, and of course portrays you to that person.  It’s possible as I mentioned previously to use emoticons.  Also there are chat sites now that do include audio features, so it’s still a relatively low bandwidth communication method.  It’s fast but it adds visual elements.

Slide 7:
Well, ICQ.  Those letters, if you run them together sound like “I seek you”.  As in S-E-E-K, I seek Y-O-U, “I seek you”.  And that’s the idea with the ICQ name.  It bridges the gap between the text chat and audio.  And in fact, ICQ provides both, so that people can easily use a microphone and speakers and chat verbally with one another, but also can use the text mode.  It’s very widespread use of ICQ.  It’s a shareware product that’s not very expensive.  I’m not sure exactly what the price is currently, but it’s around $30 to $50, certainly no more than that, and it provides that one-on-one chat, it also provides chat groups and interest areas.  Now ICQ has been acquired by AOL, which also of course has the Instant Messenger.  And ICQ is somewhat more complex system.  There’s a rather lengthy manual that goes with ICQ to describe all of the features etc.  The AOL Instant Messenger, on the other hand, is a much simpler and more straightforward system.

Slide 8:
NetMeeting and CuSeeMe.  These are two of the leading live conferencing software programs that are available and both of them are free.  The software itself from NetMeeting is available from Microsoft for a free download, and CuSeeMe is a program that was developed by Cornell University and there is both a free software CuSeeMe version as well as a commercial version.  And these provide audio and video and whiteboard capability.  It’s had a huge impact on international calls.  Many people have used these technologies over the Internet in lieu of placing toll calls to foreign countries.  So it enormously reduces the cost of making those long distance calls, particularly international calls.  The video in these systems generally create bandwidth issues.  The video is quite robust, that is, its requirements are quite robust if you’re going to get smooth video.  And so commonly with a dial up connection of only 56 kilobits per second, or even an ISDN connection, you can have a slow frame rate.  That is, you can get kind of jerky images through the video.  But another feature, which is just great in NetMeeting and CuSeeMe, well, NetMeeting in particular, is the potential to share applications and to turn control of your computer over to another machine.  Now this is particularly neat when you are trouble-shooting problems on someone else’s computer, or for a computer help station, or if your collaborating -- maybe in sharing a document or an example of a teacher working with a student at a distance and the student might have written a manuscript for class, perhaps an essay, then the teacher can bring up the manuscript on the student’s machine and mark up and indicate parts that need revision, right there while they are talking audibly one to another.  It’s just a great tool for that.

Slide 9:
Well, other items for us to be aware of for this session.  There is a spring break, even for the virtual students.  We in fact do take next week off, the following week and so our next lecture will be posted in two weeks. [Note that this lecture was prepared for the Spring 1999 semester.]  We ask that you go to WebBoard and answer the question for this week.  And then remember that your research plans are due in two weeks and we’ll have another lecture at that time and, of course, another discussion question.  So keep in touch with one another.  And I look forward to seeing you, virtually, and talking to you certainly in two weeks.