EDUCATION

WM. A. WULF

Warning: Information Technology Will Transform the University

Time has come to recreate higher education to capitalize on the technology that is here or soon to come.

Universities are in the information business, and technological developments are transforming that industry. University professors from a variety of disciplines have helped create the technologies that are forcing many U.S. industries to reinvent themselves, have advised industry leaders on how to adapt, and have analyzed the importance of the changes for society. But it's harder to look inward at the university and to think about whether it might change in dramatic ways. We should remember that although its roots are a millennium old, the university has changed before. In the early 19th century it embraced the notion of secular “liberal” education. In the late 19th century it included scholarship as an integral part of its mission. After World War II it accepted an implied responsibility for national security, economic prosperity, and public health in return for federal funding of research. Although the effects of these changes have been assimilated and now seem “natural,” at the time they involved profound reassessment of the mission and structure of the university as an institution.

Outside forces are always acting on universities. Some of them, notably the political ones, have great immediacy and hence get a good deal of attention. For example, university administrators are acutely aware of the current reassessment of the rationale for federal funding of research and the desire for greater “productivity” from the faculty, and so on. As important as these changes may be, I believe that information technology has a far greater potential to provoke fundamental change in our system of higher education. Moreover, I am certain that these changes are much closer than most people realize.

Let me be clear. Higher education will flourish. If anything, the need for advanced education is increasing. A greater percentage of the world's population needs to be educated to be productive in an increasingly technological workplace. The period during which particular skills are relevant is shortening, so the need for lifelong learning is growing. The knowledge and skills necessary to function at the frontier of knowledge are expanding as well, increasing the need for advanced degrees.

Higher education is not in danger. But we would be wise to ask whether the particularly quaint way in which universities now do their work will survive the transformation of information technology. It may, but I don't think so. I expect to see major changes—changes not only in the execution of the mission of universities but in our perception of the mission itself.

Universities historically have changed slowly, but there are times that are more propitious than others for change. The next decade is one such. Because of the speed with which information technology is advancing, decisions are being made now (or more likely, made by default) that will have a material effect on the real and perceived quality of institutions of higher education. In my experience, almost none of the current generation of senior university administrators understand what is happening. They should be confronting two central questions: Are universities like businesses that must adapt to technological change, and is the capability of the technology used for higher education really going to change all that much?

Universities share many of the attributes of traditional handcraft industries. They are highly labor intensive and depend on the skill of their master craftsmen. They have been regional, requiring collocation of the producer and customer, and have contributed to the prestige of their locales. They have a long tradition. They have evolved powerful guilds to protect the masters. And now they face the prospect of a technology that can perform many of the specialized tasks that have made their work valuable.

Universities also share at least some of the attributes of other vertically integrated industries. They “manufacture” information (scholarship) and occasionally “reprocess” it into knowledge or even wisdom, they warehouse it (libraries), they distribute it (articles and books), and they retail it (classroom teaching). Information technology has already changed each of these processes, and future change will be much greater. Like industries that have been overtaken by technology, they need to understand its individual and collective impact on their basic functions. Its not a comfortable thought, but we must at least consider that a change in technology—a change that will facilitate the flow of the university's essential commodity, information—might provoke a change in the nature of the enterprise.

As for the rate of technological progress, most people still fail to understand the dimensions of the exponential rate of improvement in information technology. For the past four decades, the speed and storage capacity of computers have doubled every 18 to 24 months; their cost, size, and power consumption have diminished at about the same rate. The band-width of computer networks has increased a thousandfold in just the past decade, and the traffic on the network continues to grow at 300 to 500 percent annually. For the foreseeable future, all of these trends will continue; the basic technology to support them exists now.

For a concrete example of what this rate of change means, consider ENIAC, the first fully electronic digital computer. A 1949 article in Popular Mechanics raved about what could be expected from computer design: “ENIAC contains about 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, but in the future computers will contain only about 1,000 tubes and weigh only one and a half tons.”

Thirty-five years later, a typical microprocessor is about 100,000 times more powerful, contains the equivalent of 10 million tubes, and weighs substantially less than an ounce. Imagine the nanoprocessor of a few decades hence.

To my knowledge, there has never been a similarly rapid, sustained change in technology, especially one with such broad social application. By comparison, even the industrial revolution seems modest in scope and leisurely in pace. Lacking a precedent, we need to work harder to imagine the impact of future computers and networks. Thinking about the current ones, in fact, can be misleading; it's all too easy to assume that something won't change just because today's technology doesn't support that change. Instead, it's almost better to hypothesize a change and then ask how soon the technology will support it; the answer will often be surprisingly soon.

Don't think about today's teleconferencing technology, but about one whose fidelity is photographic and possibly three dimensional. Don't think about the awkward way in which we access information on the network, but about a system in which the entire world's library is as accessible as my desktop files. Don't think about the clumsy interface with computers, but one that literally listens and talks in your jargon, not mine. Don't think about the storage on today's personal computer, but on one with millions of megabytes. We can't afford it now, of course, but that is the power of the equipment that will be affordable in a decade or so. That is the equipment that will shape the future of the university.

Humanists will lead the way to innovative applications of information technology in the university.

Tapping new capabilities

How will we use this equipment to change education and scholarship? That seems like a simple question, but as both an academic and a computer scientist, I don't know. The ability to process information, the raw stuff of knowledge, sits at the heart of the university mission. A technology that will alter by orders of magnitude our ability to create, store, and communicate knowledge will have an impact on how we fulfill our mission, and possibly on the mission itself. Perhaps as a start we might look at several functions of our vertically integrated information business and note how they have been and might be changed.

Scholarship. The impact of information technology on science is apparent and pervasive. Scientists now routinely talk of computation as the “third modality” of scientific investigation, on a par with theory and experimentation.

The easy examples are those that simply automate what had been done manually, such as the reduction of data and the control of instruments. The profound applications, however, are those that lead to whole new areas of research and new methods of investigation and thus to science that was not and could not be done before: analyzing molecules that have not been synthesized, measuring the properties of a single neuron by “growing” it on a silicon chip, watching a model of galaxies colliding, and letting a scientist feel the forces as a drug docks in a protein. These applications have transformed the nature of scientific investigation; they have led to questions that would not even have been asked before.

Science, however, will not be where we see the most dramatic impact. I say that despite a recent study (in which I participated) by the National Research Council that paints an expansive image of the transformation of scientific research. I believe that a more dramatic transformation is about to shake the foundations of scholarship in the liberal arts. Humanists will lead the way to innovative applications of the information technology in the university.

The comfortable stereotype of humanists as technophobic is no longer accurate. The availability of text and images in electronic form, coupled with the processing power of modern computers, allow the humanist to explore hypotheses and visualize relations that were previously lost in the mass of information sources. The presentation of humanists' scholarly results in electronic form is moving even faster. Precisely because of the complexities of the relationships they need to present, electronic “hypertext” books and journals are emerging. Indeed, they are emerging faster, with more vigor, and with more effect on their disciplines than are their counterparts in the sciences.

We all expect scientists and engineers to use computers in their research, but the notion that information technology could be central to humanistic scholarship is a bit more startling, at least to me. In large measure, it was talking about the application of computers to historiography and the theory of text that opened my eyes to the larger issues that I am trying to raise here.

Textbooks. I don't know anyone who prefers to read from a computer screen, and besides you can't take a computer to the beach, or so say the nostalgic. They are right, and yet so profoundly wrong.

There are two fallacies here. The first is the assumption that electronic books will contain only text and hence be essentially the same as paper books but in a different package. In reality, it will not be possible to reproduce electronic books on paper. They will not be a simple linear presentation of static information, but will contain animation and sound. They will let you “see the data” behind a graph by clicking on it. They will contain multidimensional links so that you can navigate through the information in ways that suit your purpose rather than the author's. They won't contain references to sources, but the source material itself; for example, the critique of a play will include its script and performance. They will have tools that let you manipulate equations, trying them on your own data or modifying them to test scientific hypotheses. They will let you annotate and augment documents for use by later readers, thus making a book a “living document.”

The second fallacy is presuming today's technology. We should not be talking about reading these electronic books from today's screen. Screens with a resolution about the same as good laser printers already exist in the laboratory. Why would anyone lug around several heavy books when something the size, clarity, and weight of a single one contains them all? I mean all: all the ones in the Library of Congress. I will take my computer to the beach!

Libraries. For thousands of years, the focus of libraries has been on the containers of information: books. The information itself was the domain of the library's users, not the library. Information technology turns that premise on its head and with it many of the deepest unstated assumptions about the function of a library.

Looking back to Alexandria and before, the principal objective of librarians has been to build the collection. But in the future a library will not collect. Electronic information can be communicated virtually instantaneously, so its source location is irrelevant. Instead of a hoarder of containers, the library must either become the facilitator of retrieval and dissemination or be relegated to the role of a museum.

If we project far enough into the future, it's not clear whether there is a distinction between the library and the book. The technology of the bibliographic citation pales by comparison with the hypertextual link: the ability to gain immediate access to the full referenced source and hence to browse through the context of the reference. It will take a long time to build the web and especially to incorporate the paper legacy, but the value of a seamless mesh will doom the discrete isolated volume.

As the library and the book merge, it seems clear to me that another merger will accompany it, a merger precipitated by devolving disciplinary boundaries. Knowledge isn't inherently compartmentalized; there is only one nature, only one human record. The division of the sciences into disciplines and subdisciplines is a human imposition, as is the division of the humanities into disciplines such as history, English, and anthropology. For very practical reasons, paper texts have mirrored this artificial division, but those reasons evaporate in the electronic world. Clearly, the “long pole in the tent” will be human rather than technological; disciplines are complex and idiosyncratic social structures that will not easily dissolve. However (and here I can only speak with the smallest authority about technological disciplines), much of the most interesting work is already happening at the boundary of traditional disciplines. That's not new news; Albert Einstein maintained that most of the important science lay at the intersections of traditional disciplines. What is new is that we have a technology that facilitates incremental accretion of knowledge at these intersections.

Finally, books are passive, sitting on shelves waiting for us to read and interpret them. Although there is an intellectual thrill in discovery and interpretation, passivity of the text is not required for that As MIT's Marvin Minsky said: “Can you imagine that they used to have libraries where the books didn't talk to each other?” One of the profound changes in store for libraries is that parts of their collection will be software agents collecting, organizing, relating, and summarizing on behalf of their human authors. They will “spontaneously” become deeper, richer, and more useful.

Teaching. The notion of computer-aided instruction has been touted for 30 years. Frankly, it has had relatively little impact, especially at the university level. The reason is obvious: Chalk and overhead projectors have been perfectly adequate technology given the current nature of scholarship and texts.

If, however, the professors are using information technology in their scholarship and the results of that scholarship can only be exhibited using the technology, the classroom will follow rapidly. How will it follow? Not, I think, by the “automated drill” scenario we have come to associate with computer-aided instruction.

These are interesting but mundane applications, mundane in the sense that they do not change the educational process in a deep way. More fundamental is the opportunity to involve students in the process of scholarship rather than merely its results. We like to say that we teach students to think, not merely to learn rote facts, but in truth we mostly limit them to thinking about what has been thought before. We can't ask them to explore new hypotheses because of the practicalities of access to sources and the sheer grunt work of collecting and analyzing data. Information technology eliminates those impediments.

The library must either become the facilitator of retrieval and dissemination of information or be relegated to the role of museum.

A hint of this kind of change can be detected in a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the impact of the release of the Thesaurus LinguÅ“ GrÅ“ce on scholarship and education in the classics. The report noted that the release of this database, which ineludes virtually all Greek literature from Homer through the fall of Byzantium, has enabled undergraduate participation in research.

One cannot leave the subject of teaching without at least mentioning the issue of “productivity,” the current code word to capture the public's frustration with the rising cost of college education and the perceived emphasis on research over teaching. The simplistic solution is to have professors spend more time in the classroom and less in the laboratory. Particularly given the wrenching restructuring that industry has undergone, the public has ample cause to ask why an elitist academe should be exempt from a reorientation toward greater customer satisfaction.

The irony, of course, is that one of the oldest figures of merit for any school—a low student/teacher ratio—is diametrically opposed to the strict definition of productivity as output per worker. Information technology is not going to resolve this tension; for our own children, we want relatively individual attention from the most qualified, intellectually alive professoriate possible. Information technology can, however, shift the focus of the discussion to the effectiveness and quality of the student/teacher interaction rather than just the number of contact hours.

Indeed, in modest ways it already has shifted that focus. By removing the barriers of space and time for example, e-mail has given my students much greater access to me than ever before. Involving students in the process of scholarship and giving them greater access to international authorities are more profound shifts, but I suspect that these are still just pale precursors of what we can do. Part and parcel of rethinking the impact of technology on the university is addressing precisely this issue.

The importance of place

Technological change will even force us to reconsider some of the fundamental assumptions about what a university is. For example, historically a university has been a place. The stone walls of St. Benedict's cloister at Monte Cassino were the bastion that provided defense against the physical and intellectual vandals of the Dark Ages. In colonial times, Jefferson's Academical Village provided access to scholarly materials as well as collegial interaction by collocation. In contemporary times, scholars flock to scientific instruments and library collections. And, where the scholars assembled, the students followed.

In his influential 19th-century essays on the university, John Cardinal Newman wrote: “If I were asked to describe…what a university was, I should draw my answer from its ancient designation of a Stadium Generale…. This description implies the assemblage of strangers from all parts in one spot.”

Newman then goes on at some length to emphasize that books are an inadequate source of true education and must be buttressed with discourse, which is obviously only feasible if the discussants are collocated. Thus the notion of being in one spot is, to him, essential to the very definition of the university; as he says, “else, how can there be any school at all?”

But with the possible exception of teaching, to which I'll return in a moment, I believe that information technology obviates the need for the university to be a place. With powerful ubiquitous computing and networking, I believe that each of the university's functions can be distributed in space, and possibly in time. Remote scholarship is the direct analog of telecommuting in the business world, and every bit as appealing. Academics tend to identify more closely with their disciplinary and intellectual colleagues than with their university. Freed from the need to be physically present in classroom, laboratory, or library, grouping by intellectual affinity may be more useful. But even then, physical grouping may be unnecessary.

There are some disciplines that need shared physical facilities, such as a telescope, that suggest the need of a place. But many large scientific instruments such as telescopes and accelerators are already run by consortia and shared by the faculty from many universities, and many of these facilities do not require the physical presence of the investigator, who could be on-line and have access through the network. Indeed, some instruments, such as those for space physics at Sondre Stomfjord in Greenland, are already accessed on the Internet. The university as place is already irrelevant to at least some scientific scholarship.

As with instruments in the sciences, direct access to archival materials is necessary for some humanistic scholarship but hardly all, and certainly not all of the time. If anything, the information infrastructure will provide greater access for a much larger set of scholars to archival materials of a quality that's “good enough.” Consider the excitement caused by the recent release of the images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, even though the scrolls themselves are not accessible to most scholars.

As for teaching, we don't really know whether it can be distributed or not. I do know that even asking the question is considered heretical by some good teachers who contend that eyeball-to-eyeball contact is necessary. Others, including me, contend that although they need feedback to teach well, there is a threshold of fidelity beyond which one does not need to go; student and teacher probably don't need to smell one another, for example. Thus, there is some finite amount of information required to produce an adequate representation of the parties. If true, when that threshold of fidelity is reached electronically, high-quality teaching will be distributed. The fallacy in Newman's reasoning was only that he could not imagine quality discourse at a distance, but that is precisely what technology will enable.

Uncertainties

Can an institution such as the university, which has existed for a millennium and become an icon of our social fabric, disappear in a few decades because of technology? Of course. If you doubt it, check on the state of the family farm. Will the university as place in particular disappear? I expect not; the reduced importance of place does not imply no place. However, just as farming has been transformed, so will the university be. The everyday life of both faculty and students will be very different.

I have more questions than answers as to the shape of the new university. Having now laid the groundwork, let me pose a few of them:

Will universities become mass-market manufacturers or distributors of information or will they be niche tutors to the privileged?
Does it really make sense for every university to support the full complement of disciplines, or should they specialize and share courses in cyberspace? This might be a natural consequence of aggregation by disciplinary affinity.
Might professors affiliate with several institutions or become freelance tutors to telepresent students? Indeed, might “tele-itinerant” scholars and tutors give new life to an ancient practice?
Might some employers (and hence students) prefer a transcript that lists with whom certain courses have been taken rather than where?
What about alumni and sports? Surely the allegiance of alumni to their alma mater has a great deal to do with place. Because the support of alumni is essential to universities, isn't that very human need sufficient to perpetuate university as place? Perhaps. But broad alumni support has become essential to the university only in relatively recent times. Moreover, alumni associations and large sports programs were created to support the university as place, not the other way around.
Will universities merge into larger units as the corporate world has done or will the opposite happen? I can argue either side of this question. On the one hand, if a university isn't (just) a place, its major remaining function is certification: It certifies the competence of the faculty, programs, and graduates. We don't need thousands of organizations to do that. On the other hand, I can envision many small colleges being empowered to provide a broad curriculum through telelocation while retaining the intimacy so valued in our small liberal arts institutions. I don't know anyone that really wants the impersonal ambiance of a mega-university. The current size of these universities seems optimized for the physical infrastructure, not for either education or scholarship.
Might the technology revive the talented amateur participation in the scientific community? Except in a few disciplines such as astronomy, the talented amateur has largely disappeared from scholarly discourse in science and engineering. Surely such individuals still exist, but they are isolated from the community of scholars. How can or should the university re-engage them?
What about the various businesses such as the university press that have affiliated with universities? My guess is that each of these will be forced to rethink its principal mission and many will be irrelevant,
Will more (most?) universities serve a global clientele, and how does that square with the publicly supported university in the United States? In particular, will private universities have greater flexibility to adapt to globalization, thus dooming the public universities?
Does the function of socializing young adults, which perhaps remains a reason for “place,” need to be coupled with the educational function or could it be done better by some form of social service?

Some will interpret these questions as threatening; I don't. That there will be a change seems inevitable. But change always implies opportunity; in this case, the opportunity to improve all facets of what we do in the academy. The challenge is to anticipate and exploit the changes.