An Educational Trip

Jerry travels to London to attend a conference on education and then goes to Birmingham to visit a major English computer show

Jerry Pournelle

The ICTE (International Conference on Technology in Education) met this year at the University of London, an institution distinguished by having on display a wax model containing the complete skeleton of Jeremy Bentham, one of the university's founders. As I understand it, Mr. Bentham, looking pretty good for his age, is wheeled--stovepipe hat and all--into meetings of the trustees, where he is recorded as "present but not voting." Naturally I went to see him: he sits in a corridor off the South Cloister, where he attracts little attention except from visitors.

I'd never been to an ICTE, and when Mrs. Pournelle was invited to present a session built around The Literacy C onnection, her program for teaching reading (see my June column)--it was also the formal launch of the new Macintosh version--this looked like a good chance to get the latest on what's happening in education. It also gave me an opportunity to get to a British computer show in the enormous new exhibit hall at Birmingham International Airport.

The ICTE was held in the University of London's Education Institute, a building whose architecture is described by those who like it as "royal brutal." The inside was nicer, with a well-designed lecture hall.

Sessions varied. Some were from education theorists who used phrases like "epistemological and didactical domains of validity" but were under the impression that they were communicating with the audience. I was more interested in examples of technology in use.

There isn't a lot. It's not that it doesn't exist: the potential is certainly there, and, where used skillfully, technology can produce remarkable gains in education quality. Of course, it' s not always used skillfully and sometimes does little to no good, but that's not the real problem. The big difficulty is that quite often it doesn't get used at all in any systematic way.

A major factor is cost. The average classroom has a budget of under $500 a year for materials and technology, hardware and software alike. That doesn't buy a lot of software, much less put computers into the classrooms.

One ICTE session was on the use of videoconferencing. Eddyth Worley, a distance-learning consultant, put on a demonstration in which both PCs and Macs were networked with teachers in London and Austin, Texas, over ordinary phone lines.

Inputs could be from any video source, such as a camcorder or a small video camera, like the VideoLabs Flexcam we have. The demonstration used hardware compression boards furnished by Northern Telecom. It all worked impressively well, but many classrooms don't have telephone lines and modems, much less several thousand dollars worth of software and proprie tary compression boards.

Those that do have modems can participate in projects like the global classroom system, in which cultural and environmental data from all over the world is collected and compared. You can get information on the Global Laboratory Project from TERC, a company that organizes projects such as student ozone research. They sell lab equipment and provide guidance on how to set up projects. I was quite impressed by the demonstration put on by Boris Berenfeld, TERC's senior scientist.

Note in every case that the results of education technology have affected education quality, at increased expense. That is generally universal, and one major reason why it has taken so long for education technology to spread more widely. This was the conclusion of an interesting report by Danish researcher Hans Siggard Jensen of the Copenhagen Business School: while technology often improves education quality, it costs more and is not necessarily cost-efficient. That lack of cost-efficiency has hind ered the spread of education technology.

Jensen's study concluded that education technology can be cost-efficient only if the system can transfer more of the "work" to the learners, who are either not paid or receive low pay (an example of students receiving low pay being vocational school students who are paid for "retraining"). The same is true with distance learning: teacher productivity can be raised only if the instructors behave as if they are in a virtual classroom; but left to itself, the situation generally defaults to a series of one-on-one encounters.

One reason education technology isn't as widespread as it ought to be is a simple lack of computers: although some schools have machines in the classrooms, most don't. Most school computers are in the offices of administrators and are used for school administration, not education.

That's changing slowly. One mechanism of change is teachers themselves, who bring their own machines to school. Some find a company that's changing compu ter models and would be willing to donate older machines to a school if someone would just ask. Sometimes a parent or group of parents will lend or give a machine to the class.

One of the main problems with computers in classrooms is security. Schoolrooms are increasingly subject to theft. Worse, machines that are locked down are often destroyed by vandals frustrated because they couldn't steal the equipment. It's a sad commentary that one reason we aren't using more technology in education is that we don't have low-cost computer security enclosures, but it's true.

Laptops are one way around the security problem, and some teachers simply bring one to class and take it home at night. That's not elegant, but it seems to work.

Once the computers get into the classroom, there are many networks for exchanging ideas on how to use them. Roberta runs one of the largest (the Education Round Table, or ERT) on GEnie and moderates a smaller one on BIX. Most computer BBSes have an education forum and libraries of software, both freeware and shareware. Few of those programs approach commercial programs in sophistication, but many of the commercial programs are prettier than they are effective. The most important thing is to find out what other teachers are doing and how it works for them.

The ICTE is a major place for learning that. Like most professional conferences, there's at least as much value in the hall and coffee-break conversations as in the formal sessions. I wish that every school teacher in the country could attend at least one ICTE meeting. That wouldn't solve the education crisis in the U.S., but it sure would help. Next year's conference runs from February 28 to March 3 in Orlando, Florida.

There's a lot of educational software, but most of it is for a single user, not for the classroom. There's software to increase vocabulary (David Kay, formerly of Kay-Pro and now of SmartTek Educational Technology, has a good series called Wordsmart that covers the lower grades to college le vel), electronic-workbench software (one of the best is Electronics Workbench from Interactive Image Technologies), and math and physics software.

There are games disguised as education programs, and there's Myst, which is an education disguised as a game. It's almost worth buying a Mac just to have it. Myst comes from Broderbund Software, the same people who made The Manhole, one of the earliest CD adventures. It's hard to describe: Myst is a small world you can explore. It's full of puzzles, all of which have logical solutions. Myst forces you into the hypothesis-experiment mode, which means it's teaching the essence of the scientific method, but I don't suppose most of those who play with it think of that. Mostly, it's a fun world to explore.

Roger Wagner (rwagnerinc@aol.com) has a program called Hyperstudio that rivals HyperCard. More on that when I get a copy. He told me the story of a teacher friend, Tony Latesse, who develops his own educational software. His philosophy is "One Goal, One Stack, in One Evening." It seems obvious when said, but I hadn't thought of it. It's also clear that with this approach, it doesn't take a great many evenings to build up an impressive library of software tailored to the specific needs of your class.

If you have a Mac with a CD-ROM drive and any interest in classical literature, you can't afford not to get The Madness of Roland from Greg Roach at Hyperbole Studios. This is an imaginative use of hypertext and QuickTime for the Mac. Roach says he originally conceived this as a stage presentation, but he soon found no one could afford to produce it. It features live actors.

Roland, or Orlando, was one of the paladins of Charlemagne. He is best known for his last stand in the pass at Roncesvalles, but his earlier madness induced by love generated a number of poems. The best known of these is Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Ariosto is largely unknown today, but he was one of the most influential poets of the Renaissance and had a considerable impa ct on English literature; he's worth rediscovering. Roach's presentation is genuinely fun and is a real-live, no-question-about-it work of art for multimedia. Recommended.

We took the train up to Birmingham to see the National Computer Shopper show. The train ride was delightful. My British friends complain about their trains, but I found them clean, fast, frequent, and on time.

There will always be an England. I got a newspaper to read on the train ride, and as we rode for the hour or so to Birmingham, I read an article in London's Daily Mail about the latest sex education scandal. Apparently someone in the Department of Health hired the "agony uncle" of a teen magazine to write a sex education manual, and several hundred thousand copies were printed before the politically appointed Minister of Health saw it. She instantly blushed and ordered them all destroyed; they were far too explicit and "treated sex in a mechanical way without regard to emotions."

The Labour opposition "shadow" Mini ster of Health (the person who would become Minister if Labour were to win a majority in the House of Commons) had demanded a copy but was told none were available. Perhaps so, but the Daily Mail had obtained a copy, and when I read excerpts from it as printed in the paper, I managed to shock some of the businesspeople in our train compartment.

If the Daily Mail had a copy, I bet someone with a scanner got one as well, and I expect if you really want to read this thing, you can find it on the Internet. I doubt it has become road kill on the information highway.

The National Computer Shopper show was well organized, not as large as the old West Coast Computer Faire in its prime, but bigger than the recent Los Angeles Computer Faire. Many of the larger companies, including IBM and Microsoft, were there. Creative Labs also had a large booth, which shouldn't be surprising, because one feature of the show was a Doom (see my April column) tournament. There was a huge booth where you could play Doom un til you were hooked and then purchase a copy.

There were a number of other game presentations, as well as the usual computer retailers with blowout sales and dealers in business and education software. Prices were lower than those I saw in London stores, but, of course, I wasn't really shopping. Memory in Britain is £33 a mega-byte, comparable to U.S. prices, and a 66-MHz 486DX2 VL-Bus clone was £700 at the show.

Unlike the old West Coast Computer Faire, this show didn't go in much for conferences and speeches; everyone was too busy playing Doom, anyway. It was a good overview of computing in Britain, and I'm glad I went, particularly since it was a fine day and the trip from London to Birmingham runs through some really delightful countryside, clean and green with a canal running alongside the tracks. I also saw signs proclaiming the virtues of Britain's clean nuclear power plants that run the electric railroads. That's something you don't see much of over here.

It's astonishing what the y can do with disk storage. Our new Pentium has a DEC hard drive with a gigabyte of storage, 1000 MB, for under $1000. That's impressive, but BSE has more than half that, 520 MB, on their latest Flashdrive. Flashdrives operate from the parallel port. The whole package, including batteries to run it for several hours, is smaller than a cigar box. The new 520-MB model is fast, too, faster than regular hard drives were only a couple of years ago.

Installation is simple: you just add DEVICE=C:\FLASHDRV.SYS to your CONFIG.SYS file and copy the file to your root directory. I do have a few warnings. The BSE installation program puts the device statement as the very first thing in your CONFIG.SYS file, and if you're running QEMM.SYS, that will probably lock up your system. If that happens, you can either get out your panic floppy disk or turn off the Flashdrive and reboot; the device won't install if it can't find a valid drive. Then edit CONFIG.SYS to put the FLASHDRV.SYS statement below QEMM.SYS. That done, you can run QEMM's OPTIMIZE command: FLASHDRV.SYS loads high quite well.

The other warning is that if you have an older Flashdrive unit, such as the 120-MB version partitioned into four 30-MB logical drives, be sure to save your old device driver. The new FLASHDRV.SYS is superfast, but it's not backward-compatible with the older drives.

I copied my old FLASHDRV.SYS into a subdirectory called OFLASH and put the statement DEVICE=C:\OFLASH\FLASHDRV.SYS into the CONFIG.SYS file. After testing it with the old unit, I remarked both device-driver statements out. When I'm ready to go on a trip, I bring up which-ever Flashdrive I'll be carrying and copy all the necessary elements of my work environment onto it. Flashdrives work with all the portables I have, including notebooks; all that's required is that the machine have a parallel port.

The Flashdrive unit has a printer port on it. My 520-MB unit prints only if it's powered by the AC adapter, but I'm told current models will print with just bat tery power.

Incidentally, you want to be careful what power adapter you use on a Flashdrive. I managed to connect my 120-MB Flashdrive unit to the 18-VAC adapter for a modem--they were both in my travel bag--and blew out the electronics. BSE says that happens several times a year. The fix is a new drive electronics board and a new plastic bottom to the drive case, because the overpower blows a small condenser on the drive board. The drive unit isn't harmed. BSE sent me the repair kit, and it took me about 5 minutes to get it running like new.

BSE drives are a good deal for portables and sneakernets. For that matter, they make great backups. You can even access one across a Windows for Workgroups network, provided that the host machine is set to share it. I'm paranoid enough that when I work on the road, I save it onto a floppy disk as well as the Flashdrive; but I have to say I have never lost a byte saved on a Flashdrive, and I haven't been particularly gentle with mine. Sometimes it travels in my wheeled carryon; other times it gets wrapped up in pajamas and sent in checked luggage. Recommended.

There are times when I hate Windows. For instance: I recently tried to install a new game in my Games group. It wouldn't install, and the error message said that I had insufficient memory; I should shut down some applications and try again. I shut down everything except Program Manager and tried again--and got the same error message.

Some programs don't properly release resources back to Windows when you shut them down, so I closed Windows and reset my machine by turning it off. Then I restarted and brought up Windows. When I went to install my game, I got the same error message. Since there was nothing to shut down, this didn't seem helpful. Of course, it happened on a Sunday night when I couldn't call anyone.

All right, I'm using too much memory, I thought. I have a lot of fonts installed. Let's get rid of some and free up some resources. I went through the font library with fire and sword. If you've ever installed CorelDraw, you'll have an awful lot of fonts you'll probably never use. Some other programs give you oddball things as well. For instance, from somewhere I had two Hebrew letter fonts installed. I figured that if I ever needed them I could reinstall, and eliminated them along with a number of others named for obscure cities like Yakima. Then I exited Windows, reset the machine, came back, and got the same error message when I tried to install my new game.

Eventually I figured it out, although I am not sure what put me on the right track. My Games group has a number of obsolete game icons in it, games that I long ago eliminated. When I eliminated one of those, the "insufficient memory" problem went away.

I had 28 items in the Games group. That, as it happens, is too many. Since we previously discovered that you can't have more than 28 groups, it follows that Windows will allow you to access no more than 784 programs total. This is probably a lot, but still, it is a limit. More worrisome is why the error message is so singularly misleading.

If any of this is documented, I can't find it. Brian Livingston's Windows Secrets has three index references to the "insufficient memory" message, and none of them remotely hint that the problem is too many files in one group. I sure wish someone would write a good Windows debugger before Windows drives me totally up the wall.

So if Windows drives you nuts, what about using OS/2, which doesn't have that problem? Well, it has troubles of its own: I recently managed to crash OS/2 to hardware reset level, and all I was doing was editing a reply to some MCI mail in Norton Commander. I didn't do anything weird, either, just went to the end of the message and came back up into the text to edit; and whambo, Commander locked up, and I couldn't manage to get OS/2 to respond. Eventually there was nothing for it but to turn the machine off. That kind of lockup is pretty rare for OS/2.

It's less rare for Windows, but I use W indows more than OS/2. Most of my Windows crashes seem to be associated with sound cards. As soon as I open an application and get the message that Sound Blaster is in use by another program, I worry. About half the time when that happens, I find I can't shut Windows down properly. Ctrl-Alt-Del will usually shut down broken applications, but not always, as, for instance, a few minutes ago, when I had to use hardware reset to get out of Windows.

The real lesson is that whether you use Windows, OS/2, or just plain DOS, you should save early and often, and back up your work frequently. None of that has changed since CP/M days.

I like Microsoft Word 6.0 for Windows, I really do, but I think it is part of the plot to drive me mad. I'd done quite a lot of work on the sequel to Legacy of Heorot--our working title is Beowulf's Children--and it was time to let Larry Niven take a pass through it. Ever since Niven and I changed over to Word 6.0 because we like the version-control and document-comparison fea tures, we've had some file transfer problems, so I was very careful. First, I saved our work, about 70,000 words. Then I closed the file and closed Word. Then I used File Manager to copy BEO1.DOC to a floppy disk. I took that floppy disk to Percival the Pentium, copied the file to the appropriate subdirectory, opened Word 6.0 on Percival, and read the file in. No problems, so I sent Niven home with the disk.

An hour later he called me. He was getting an error message that in theory offered him the choice of canceling or ignoring, but choosing ignore did nothing, and choosing cancel informed him that he had a general protection fault in Word 6.0. This was getting in the way of his trying to edit the novel.

"All right," says I. "Turn off your machine. Wait and turn it on. When it's up, do CD NC and then NC to get into Norton Commander. Now, let's go to C:\WINWORD\BEOWULF and tell me what you see."

"I see a file called BEO1.DOC and another called $BEO1.DOC," Larry said.

I told him to select both files and delete them. Then use Commander to copy BEO1.DOC from the floppy disk again. Now enter Windows and see if you can edit it. That worked fine, except Larry said, "This sure doesn't feel much like being an author."

"Well, I can always print it out and let you do rewrites on a typewriter," I said with amiable malice; but he was right. When you're trying to write fiction, you don't want to be thinking about word processors and general protection faults.

I sent E-mail to Chris Peters, Micro-soft's Word guru, and worked on something else. It wasn't long before I had an answer from Chris: clearly something is wrong, and while Microsoft works on it, do Tools, Options, select the Save folder, and turn off fast saves. I did that.

Next morning Larry called: he was getting the same problem again. Fortunately, he hadn't done much work on the file, so little was lost, but he was getting pretty upset, which was no wonder. I had him close Word, open it again, and attempt to read in B EO1.DOC. It crashed, so we went through the drill again, starting with turning the machine off and recopying from the floppy disk. "Now," I said, when he was back in Word for Windows again, "Before you read in the file, do Tools, Options, Save, and select 'always create backup copy.' That should exorcise this bug."

"Can we cut off its head, drive a stake through its heart, and bury it at a crossroad?" Larry asked.

"And build a cathedral over the crossroad. Right."

And, in fact, the "always create backup copy" option seems to have done that. We no longer see the file $BEO1.DOC, which I think was causing the problem, and we no longer get disk crashes.

I make no doubt that Microsoft will fix this and get out a new maintenance release, possibly before you read this; but my advice for Word 6.0 users is to select the "always create backup copy" option and leave it on. I find that it doesn't add more than a couple of seconds to the time required to save a whole novel, and since I save at the end of nearly every paragraph--a habit I got into in CP/M days--it sure makes me feel better to know that at worst I'll lose only a few minutes' work. Save early, save often, and make backup copies, that's my motto.

Incidentally, one of the things I like about Word 6.0 is the organization of all those options; if you get Word 6.0, do pull down Tools, select Options, and poke around in all the folders you find. You'll be glad you did.

One thing I found, under general options, was a button that lets me use white-on-blue text. I've always wanted that, and I suspect they put it in just for me. Alas, it works just fine if it's turned on when you're creating a document, but when I select that option and load a new document, I get black-on-blue, which is unreadable. Nice try, though, and maybe they'll get that fixed in the next release, too. Microsoft does work to keep Word in good shape. It's big, but it's fast, and the scaled-down laptop installation version works well enough on my Zenith Masters port.

In my April Awards column, I said that I wasn't writing about new printers because no one had sent me any. That's subject to misinterpretation, and a reader wrote to say that he was thinking of cobbling up some junky eight-wire dot-matrix printer and sending it to me so that I would write about it. I think I'd better clear this up.

We got several new printers last year, and I should have said that other than the Fargo dual-mode color printer (which I did write about), I hadn't received any printer I felt compelled to write about. I get a lot of stuff here that I never mention. Sometimes it's pretty good stuff, but not so much better than what I'm already using that I feel I just have to replace what I've got. In particular, the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet III I've had for a couple of years now has proved to be plenty good enough for what I do. The only thing I might have replaced it with was the Kyocera Ecosys, and Roberta snarfed that.

You have to remember, I don't do "reviews" as such . I am primarily a writer, which is to say I have about the same computer requirements as many small businesspeople. I write, do spreadsheets, keep databases, and draw illustrations and maps. I need programs and equipment for all that. I also have some interest in and connection to the space program and other high-tech research, so I look at stuff related to that. My wife has spent her life in the education field. I write about what we use, and our interests are broad enough that we work with a lot of equipment and software. We're also chronically behind on our work, and I hold deeply the opinion that if it ain't broke you shouldn't fix it, so I don't lightly change from something that works to something new.

Of course, I like playing with new stuff, and I have an obligation to experiment with enough new hardware and software to fill this column every month, so I do try a lot of new things; some get into this column and some don't. Although the earthquake helped us clear out some space, Chaos Manor is filling up again; so, in general, if I'm not impressed with something, I get rid of it fast, and it's not around when it comes time to write. There's always more worth writing about than I have space for.

So my apologies if I misled anyone. We did get several printers, but none I fancied over the LaserJet III for DOS/Windows and the Apple LaserWriter for the Mac. Niven has a LaserJet 4, which we both like, and if I were to replace my LaserJet III, that's what I'd get.

I think the U.S. Patent Office has gone mad. Their latest outrageous action would be funny if the consequences weren't so serious.

As you may know, PC Dynamics of Westlake Village, California, has a screen saver that pops up the Energizer bunny doing odd things at random times. Niven has it installed on his machine: you'll be working on something, and suddenly there's that silly rabbit parachuting down through your work. PC Dynamics has licensed the bunny image and pays a fee for using it.

Comes now the law firm of Kno bbe, Martens, Olson, & Bear demanding money on behalf of Software Advertising of La Costa, California, on the grounds that Software Advertising has a patent that covers any "system which integrates an advertisement into a computer software program without altering the function of the program. Screen-saver programs, which perform their intended function yet display advertisements, are the type of programs covered by the patent," writes attorney Edward J. Treska.

This is bizarre. For instance: Flying Toasters was not originally the advertising logo of Berkeley Systems, so it was all right for them to use it; but now that Berkeley has trademarked Flying Toasters and uses it as a logo, presumably they owe a royalty to Software Advertising.

Moreover, Microsoft's Flying Windows is clearly in violation, and Messrs. Knobbe et al. should write a threatening letter to Bill Gates on behalf of Software Advertising. For that matter, I have a scanned image of the first issue of BYTE in which my column appeare d as a regular feature; I use it as wallpaper. Am I in violation of a patent?

Software Advertising got this patent in 1992; so far, this is the first I've seen of an attempt to enforce it. It probably won't be the last, but I'll bet Software Advertising hasn't gone after Bill Gates, or anyone in a position to stand up to them and tell them what they deserve to hear.

I can't believe that demanding money from the Energizer bunny promotes the Progress of Science and the useful Arts; and I can't think Congress does either.

Photo CD hasn't caught on as well as I would have thought. In my own case, I take lots of pictures and then can't ever find one when I want it; Photo CD seems like a splendid opportunity to get all my pictures organized and available on file.

Eastman Kodak has two programs, Arrange-It and Create-It, that let you do a lot with the pictures you've stored on a Photo CD. I haven't worked with them enough to give a definite opinion, but they look good to me as a presentation management tool. You can use these programs to create a scripting language for building your own Photo CD for presentations, including multimedia. I used to do lectures illustrated with slides. Now, many lecture halls have screen projection equipment. It would be very useful if I could get "Survival w ith Style" onto a CD I could then project. More on this another time, but it looks good to me.

The book of the month is Alvin and Heidi Toffler's War and Anti-War (Little, Brown, 1993). I recently had dinner with the Tofflers, who are as interesting in person as their books. This is one of their better ones, and I'd have been proud to have written it.

I've also recently discovered a series of novels by Patrick O'Brian. They're British Navy novels set in the Napoleonic era, and if you liked Horatio Hornblower, you'll love Jack Aubrey. It's best if you start with the first one, Master & Commander (Norton, 1970). Fair warning, there are 15 books in the series, and once you start, it will be hard to stop.

The first computer book of the month isn't precisely a book, but if you use Windows for Workgroups, you need Microsoft's Windows for Workgroups Resource Kit, which includes a book about resources and a disk of utilities. Microsoft also has a Windows Resource Kit, but I presume you already kno w that. If you don't, get it if you use Windows.

The first game of the month is for the Macintosh: Spelunx from Broderbund Software. This is another learning experience disguised as a game; it's advertised for ages 612, and that seems to be about right. There's a lot to explore. This isn't Myst, but then nothing is.

The PC game of the month is Gametek's Frontier Elite II. It's a space trader game, but if you're of a turn of mind to go fight pirates and shoot people, there's plenty of opportunity for that, too. It features literally thousands of worlds you can explore. Many are inhabited, and some are strange indeed. The graphics aren't as nice as Origen's Wing Commander series, nor is the action as hot, but the planets are more interesting. And how. Want to mine asteroids? Scoop fuel from a gas giant? Here's your chance.

Due to travel and a few minor complications, I didn't get as much done with the Pentium as I'd like. We have a new gigabyte rewritable glass disk for it. I'm also working on getting a PowerPC Mac; I've neglected Macs lately, and I shouldn't. Stay tuned.

For More Information

Photo CD seems like a splendid opportunity to get all my pictures organized and available on file. Eastman Kodak also offers two programs, Arrange-It ($395) and Create-It ($245), that let you do a lot with the pictures you've stored on a Photo CD. Contact Eastman Kodak Co., 343 State St., Rochester, NY 14650, (800) 235-6325 or (716) 724-4000; fax (716) 726-3108.

One of the best electronic-workbench software packages is Electronics Workbench ($299) from Interactive Image Technologies, Ltd., 700 King St. W, Suite 815, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5V 2Y6, (800) 263-5552 or (416) 361-0333; fax (416) 368-5799.

The Energizer Bunny Screen Saver for Windows ($29.95) pops up the Energizer bunny doing odd things at random times. Contact PC Dynamics, Inc., 31332 Via Colinas, Suite 102, Westlake Village, CA 91362, (800) 888-1741 or (818) 889-1741; fax (818) 889-1014.

BSE Flashdrives (80 t o 520 MB; from $399 to $1099) are a good deal for portables and sneaker-nets. For that matter, they make great backups. I have never lost a byte saved on a Flashdrive, and I haven't been particularly gentle with mine. Recommended. Contact The BSE Co., Inc., 2114 North Fourth St., Flagstaff, AZ 86004, (602) 527-8843; fax (602) 527-1540.

Frontier Elite II ($64.99) is a space trader game that features literally thousands of worlds you can explore. Many are inhabited, and some are strange indeed. Contact Gametek, Inc., 2999 Northeast 191st St., North Miami Beach, FL 33180, (800) 426-3835 or (305) 935-3995; fax (305) 932-8651.

Projects like the global classroom system collect and compare cultural and environmental data from all over the world. You can get information on the Global Laboratory Project from TERC, 2067 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02140, (617) 547-0430; fax (617) 349-3535.

One of the ICTE sessions was on the use of videoconferencing in the classroom. The demonstration used ha rdware compression boards furnished by Northern Telecom, Saint Cloud Way, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 8XB, U.K., +44 628 812000; fax +44 628 21787.

I wish every school teacher in the country could attend at least one International Conference on Technology in Education. Contact The University of Texas at Austin, College of Education, P.O. Box AA, Austin, TX 78713, (512) 471-4080; fax (512) 471-8786.

The Madness of Roland ($59.95) is genuinely fun and is a real-live, no-question-about-it work of art for multimedia. Recommended. Contact Hyperbole Studios, Inc., 1756 114th Ave. SE, Suite 204, Bellevue, WA 98004, (206) 451-7751; fax (206) 451-7844.

Microsoft Word 6.0 for Windows ($495) is big, but it's fast, and the scaled-down laptop installation version works well enough on my Zenith Mastersport. Contact Microsoft Corp., 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, (800) 426-9400 or (206) 882-8080; fax (206) 883-8101.

Myst ($60) is an education disguised as a game. It's almost worth buying a Mac just to have it. Spelunx ($35) is another learning experience disguised as a game; it's advertised for ages 612, and that seems about right. Contact Broderbund Software, 500 Redwood Blvd., Novato, CA 94948, (800) 521-6263 or (415) 382-4400; fax (415) 382-4419.

A good software series to increase vocabulary, Wordsmart ($59.95 to $64.95) covers lower grades to college level. Contact SmartTek Educational Technology, Inc., 2223 Avenida De La Playa, La Jolla, CA 92307, (800) 858-9673 or (619) 456-5064; fax (619) 456-3928.

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Jerry Pournelle holds a doctorate in psychology and is a science fiction writer who also earns a comfortable living writing about computers present and future. Jerry welcomes readers' comments and opinions. Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Jerry Pournelle, c/o BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. Please put your address on the letter as well as on the envelope. Due to the high volume of letters, Jerry cannot guarantee a personal reply. You can al so contact him on the Internet or BIX at jerryp@bix.com .