It is widely assumed ‐ and frequently asserted ‐ that university communication practices are being radically transformed by the introduction of electronic communication. Explores the introduction of Internet access in a single university, the University of Canberra, located in the capital city of Australia. The prime objective was to identify the frequency and type of use that academic staff were making of the Internet during 1995, with supplementary objectives being to record perceptions of users toward the Internet, and barriers to its effective use. The principal finding is not unexpected: academics were making very varied use of the Internet. Some staff were utilizing some facilities on a daily basis; others were yet to begin exploring this new communication medium. A particular surprise was that at the time of this survey the Internet was being used very little for teaching.

We live in a world being transformed by technology. Ten years ago few academics anywhere in the world walked into an office with an institutionally-provided computer sitting on their desk, let alone one connected to countless millions of potential information sources and other resources. As this study found, 95 percent of Australian academics surveyed now have just such a facility. It would be difficult not to see this as symptomatic of a transformation of academic life and of the role of the university in our society.Recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that over 40 percent of Australians aged 18 and over accessed the Internet in the 12 months to February 1999 (ABS, 1999). Other figures show that of the 1.3 million households with home Internet access (February, 1999) 40 percent access Internet daily. Nearly 50 percent of adults employed full-time (3.1 million) had access to the Internet within the previous 12 months and 1.5 million access the Internet from places such as public libraries and schools. Overall about 5.2 million adults (62 percent of employed Australians) use computers for work purposes. Yet even these figures are dwarfed by the potential demand: about 64 percent of adults are interested in using online services from home, and 47 percent of adults are interested in online educational services such as those that universities are now starting to offer. Nearly 4 percent of adults use the Internet to purchase or order goods or services, making 1.9 million purchases online in the 12 months from February 1998 to February 1999.Here, then, is a technology that is attracting significant public interest. Yet, to date, there has been almost no quantitative research on the use that people are making of their access to the Internet. There have been both popular and scholarly works informing us of its advantages (Gates 1995;Spender 1995), or warning about its perils (Nieuwenhuisen, 1997). Unfortunately, most of the surveys so far carried out have used the Internet itself as the distribution medium (for example, Bane and Milheim, 1995;Starr and Milheim, 1996). It should be obvious that only those currently connected, and reasonably proficient with the technology, would be able to respond to such surveys. A related problem is that it is impossible to calculate any meaningful

No abstract

SUMMARYThis paper surveys a number of the implementations of Linda that are available in Java. It provides some discussion of their strengths and weaknesses, and presents the results from benchmarking experiments using a network of commodity workstations. Some extensions to the original Linda programming model are also presented and discussed, together with examples of their application to parallel processing problems.