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Knowledge Media Institute Concept Videos

1994 KMi Virtual Summer School and Future Concept Videos


While working towards the creation of the Knowledge Media Institute in late 1994, Marc Eisenstadt, Tom Vincent and Kitty Chisholm, with support from then-Vice-Chancellor Sir John Daniel, commissioned a team working under the direction of Clive Holloway at the BBC to create a 'concept video'. Their brief was to explain in around 7 minutes what the future of the Open University might be in the rapidly-emerging landscape of new knowledge media technologies.

The concept video was itself inspired by a bold (and ultimately amusing) 'near-miss' attempt to give Open University students a taster of these new experiences during a 1994 "Virtual Summer School". This relied on a series of "best of breed" technologies, including the Mosaic web browser, CU-SeeMe video, and 14.4Kbps dial-up modems! Even with these new and basic technologies, much was learned during the experience, and this ultimately influenced the direction of KMi and the OU over the ensuing decade.

The video sequence includes excerpts from Virtual Summer School, including a segment where it goes horribly wrong, and the full Concept Video. The video itself was not formally "released" because of concerns by the commissioning team about an audience backlash against the emotional "coldness" of the future landscape, but is presented here for historical interest, and for the way in which it reveals the forward-looking nature of some 1994 experiments undertaken in the "early boom" era of the Internet.


 
The Open University Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities