No. 39

November 5, 2001

 

Technology:

Trillian (and Jabber)

In one sentence:
Trillian is an instant messaging client that allows connecting to several competing IM services, without switching to their proprietary clients.

In detail:
I hope you'll forgive me: with nothing truly innovative on the horizon, I've decided not to wait any longer but to review a tool I am not all that excited about... Not that this is a crummy tool - in fact, it is quite good at what it does - but it is "just" an instant messenger and I haven't yet made up my mind as to whether the whole instant messaging (IM) thing is a helpful tool or a major annoyance. Probably both - like the now ubiquitous cellular phones that go off at most inappropriate times and places.

Just in case you haven't yet heard of instant messaging (how is this possible...?), here's what this is all about: after you sign up (for free) with an instant messaging service and install the appropriate client, you build a "buddy list" by entering names of people you want to communicate with, who also use this service. From that point on, whenever any of your "buddies" opens his instant messaging client, the service notifies you that he is now available online, and you can send him a text message, which he receives immediately and can respond to. Kind of like bumping into a colleague in the hallway, saying, "Have a minute?", and asking him a few questions. Quite nice, except that this can quickly become a street where someone can bump into you every minute, and who likes to be constantly interrupted?

The fact is, a lot of people are using instant messengers these days. Not only teens, who took to it from the very beginning, but professionals and even entire corporations, which deploy instant messaging "solutions" in their intranets. So, they must be useful and not all that annoying. They would be even more useful, if the popular instant messaging services (Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, AOL IM, MSN Messenger) were able to communicate with one another. Unfortunately, they do not, so a user of ICQ cannot send a message to a pal on AOL IM (despite the fact that both are owned by the same company - AOL!) and vice versa. One has no choice but to become a member of two or more services and run multiple instant messaging clients, in order to communicate with friends and coworkers who use different services.

The reason I'm pointing toward Trillian, rather than any of the better known IM clients, is that it is not adding to the confusion by offering yet another incompatible IM service, but instead acting as a kind of "universal remote control", allowing the user to communicate directly with any of the other services. In other words, I no longer have to switch between multiple clients. Alas, I still must have accounts on the other services so that Trillian can log me in and check for my buddies, but the various buddy lists, the availability status, and the instant messages themselves are now in one place. Trillian also allows connecting to IRC (Internet Relay Chat) servers, to which it presents itself as a standard chat client.

Unified buddy list on Trillian


One shortcoming of Trillian is that it is only available for Windows (all flavors), with no Mac or Linux versions on the horizon. For those users there is a glimmer of hope under the name of Jabber. This increasingly popular instant messenger with Open Source roots is somewhat similar to Trillian, in that it enables communication with competing services. However, it is an IM platform in its own right, thus increasing existing fragmentation of the IM world, and offers interoperability with fewer services than Trillian; most notably, AOL IM is absent from the roster. On the positive site, there are dozens of Jabber clients available, including at least one for Mac OS X.

Final note: Trillian, Jabber, and all the other IM services are free for end users.

Online reading:

Il Mondo di Fantasia - 3D Educational Magazine

From the announcement: "This bilingual magazine's mission is to provide a forum for reporting on people, events, technology, and issues involved in the use and study of 3D Active Worlds and Virtual Reality in education. Our vision for this forum is to help, in a modest way, to explore and enrich the research and practice of educational projects based on 3D Worlds. The potentialities of educational experiences on 3D Active Worlds can lead the way towards a new approach to learning, based on multiple intelligences, constructivism, active and collaborative learning."

Content of the first issue:

  • Interview with 3D artist and designer Franz Fischnaller on creation of new forms of art and culture
  • Roundtable with Mario Rotta on the introduction of new technologies in schools
  • Roundtable with Cinzia Gandini on virtual laboratories
  • Interview with Grazia Cesarini and Maurizio Bracardi about their experience as online tutors in a course for librarians, part of which took place on Active Worlds
  • Report on educational exchange among European Schools involving use of a 3D world
  • Lesson plan for "Multiple Intelligences and New Technologies"
  • How to tell educational digital stories

Emerging Models of Online Collaborative Learning: Can Distance Enhance Quality?
by Stephen C. Ehrmann and Mauri Collins

In this essay the authors decry the fact that "few courses or institutions appear to be using computer mediated workspaces to foster new forms of educational interaction (...) that would support qualitative changes in the ways that students work with others as they learn." However, not content with mere criticism of the status quo they devote the bulk of their article to describing three promising themes, which, when implemented, can

  • Intensive interaction among the students
  • Breaking down the walls of the classroom in order to benefit from interaction among learners who are more numerous and more diverse than would be found in any one course
  • Breaking down the walls of the classroom so that students can learn by analyzing data that no one course or group of students could have gathered.

She said, he said:

"Everything that can be invented, has been invented." - Charles H. Duell in 1899


© 2001 Vlad Wielbut and the Alliance for Community Technology