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The idea of a university: New opportunities for Penn in the information age

By Gregory C. Farrington and Michael Eleey

We live in the early years of one of the great revolutions in human history. From computers that recognize speech and handwriting, to the information superhighway and the world of virtual reality, the digital revolution is transforming how we live, work, and relate to each other.

The information age will provide universities with a wide range of new opportunities for serving society more creatively and effectively. In many parts of the world, communications technology will soon connect each of us with everyone else through the real-time transmission of still and moving images, sound and data; information storage technology will make it possible to locate and access stored information anywhere; and powerful computation will make possible ever more accurate simulations of reality and human-like interaction with machines.

Communications technology will free universities from constraints of space and time and change where, when, and how students can interact with universities. If information can be accessed everywhere and stored anywhere, what then is the role of the university as physical repository of information? What is the role of the traditional university library? If students and professors can be anywhere and interact almost as if they were present in the same room, must students sit in a classroom and professors stand in front of them? If students no longer need to be always present at a university to access information and interact with faculty, then might their involvement with the university encompass their entire lives?

Powerful computational technology will also change how students study and learn. The lecture style of education has two roles: to challenge and inspire students to reason, think, and create; and to transmit information. The former will surely be done best by humans for a long time to come; but the role of humans in the latter will be increasingly challenged by friendly computers. The capability of computers to access and present information in new and flexible ways, to simulate reality, and to interact with students in the teaching of skills will make computers increasingly powerful tools in education.

Of course learning will remain a very human process. To learn to think, students must be challenged to think; to learn to write, they must write. Transforming information into knowledge and even wisdom will remain a very personal struggle. Technology's role is to enrich the ways in which faculty and students interact in teaching, learning, and creating; to make learning a more, not less, human and personal process.

For the past year, an ad hoc group of Penn faculty and staff (and more recently, students as well) has been gathering to share ideas about the possible impact of information technology on education and the opportunities it presents. By no means has this Committee on Electronic Publishing and Interactive Technologies yet involved all of the many people working on such issues at Penn. It has simply attempted to articulate some ideas and possible directions for the development and integration of technology and education the University. Following are several of the specific issues that are being discussed.

Penn everywhere, all the time

The ability to be with the university without being at it will open up many opportunities for new educational programs. Students already can access many of Penn's resources from anywhere in the world; soon they will be able to interact with the University even when it is not convenient to travel and live here, i.e., most of their lives. Attend- ing lectures and courses via cable and satellite will become easier, as will truly interactive, two-way communication among students and faculty wherever they may be. This technology makes it far easier to see the University's mission as life-long learning, not just intensive under- graduate and graduate experiences.

Students and faculty can be with the virtual university without being at it

At Penn several schools already provide off-site education via telecommunications. A number of other universities have formed consortia to develop prototype educational networks. It is important that we expand these programs and learn more about how telecommunica- tions can help extend the University's reach across the country and around the world.

Now that all Penn students have access to electronic mail, we should press on to exploit the power of PennNet and initiatives such as ResNet (Penn's four-year effort to provide data, cable TV, and private voice line connections to all on-campus residences) to link students and faculty and make possible a range of new services and styles of academic interaction. Some examples of the kinds of interactions possible in a truly networked campus include on-line access to library collections; the expansion of faculty advising beyond office hours, through elec- tronic mail; improved course registration processes, such as networked distribution of continually updated course offerings and enrollment data; study group collaboration through electronic communication; and extended class discussion through computer conferencing. These are just a few of the ways in which a truly networked campus can interact. Some Penn schools and administrative functions already use PennNet for these purposes. Expanding its use should be a high priority.

Modern communications also can change the meaning of "study abroad." Through telecomputing facilities it is easy to imagine a student taking a course in French literature at the Sorbonne from his or her dorm room in Philadelphia, or a student in Singapore participating in an Internet seminar offered by a Penn professor. Faculty colla- boration with colleagues from around the world will become far easier when personal computers can function as sophisticated video phones and show pictures and data in real time. Scientific meetings among parti- cipants in different locations can already be organized on-screen, thus saving time and expense. At Penn, an ad hoc Videoconferencing Group has begun looking at how these emerging capabilities can create new educational opportunities and how to take advantage of them.

New forms of academic publishing

For example, simulation and visualization software can transform the way mathematics and subjects based on mathematics are taught. Equations can be plotted and visualized on-screen, and thus (continued on next page) become real in a way never possible on paper. Science diskbooks can include simulated experiments, visual displays of real experiments, and interactive problems. Medical texts can include moving pictures, including simulated surgery. History diskbooks can integrate information from primary sources, visuals, sound, and moving pictures. Diskbooks for language instruction can include powerful dictionaries, foreign film clips, and interactive speaking and pronunciation guides. Diskbooks for architecture can incorporate dynamic visuals of landscapes and buildings, and allow for practice in creating new designs. Although the field is in its infancy, diskbooks of this sort are already becoming available, including some developed by Penn faculty and staff.

Perhaps even more challenging is the concept of "netbooks," based on new Internet "navigation" software such as Mosaic, from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Using tools such as Mosaic, an author now can integrate geographically distributed sets of information just as conveniently as CD-ROM diskbook, but much more dynamically. Such hypermedia netbooks can make the entire global network appear to the "reader" almost like a local CD-ROM; yet they can be instantaneously updated or revised.

It is not yet clear how a faculty member not particularly skilled in computer use will be able to publish in these new formats. What role should a university press play in this new world of publishing? How should the university foster development of diskbook and netbook publishing?

Penn has a number of activities underway that are exploring these issues. Several schools have technical and design staff who work with faculty to develop new instructional tools and provide access to new multimedia technologies, training opportunities, and technical assis- tance. These school-based centers recently formed a campus Interactive Technologies Network, coordinated by the Office of Information Systems and Computing, to facilitate the sharing of resources and expertise and further the awareness and development of new technology at Penn. The Office of Information Systems and Computing also facilitates the Inter- active Technologies Group, an interest group comprising several dozen staff and faculty active in multimedia production.

Penn is also one of thirteen universities selected in January 1994 by the American Association of University Presses and the Coalition for Networked Information for a national initiative to explore the "role of university presses in the networked information environment." A joint sub-mission by the University of Pennsylvania Press, the Libraries, and the Office of Information Systems and Computing outlined a number of experimental projects Penn plans as part of the initiative. They will include a multimedia edition of a literary text from the Penn Reading Project and an interactive "diskbook" in materials science. The initiative will also provide opportunities for Penn to actively explore, with other universities and industry part-ners, related practical issues such as cataloging, intellectual property rights, and team-based authoring approaches.

The new university library

How will these information resources be organized? What search and retrieval mechanisms are appropriate and useful for hypertext and multi- media resources? How can poorly-scanned images and texts be effectively indexed and organized? How can fair-use copyright access be maintained for electronic information resources? To explore these questions, the Digital Libraries Group was formed in February 1994. It includes repre- sentatives from several Penn libraries; research faculty from linguistics, computer science, cognitive science, and other disciplines; and members of a number of information technology support groups on campus. The Digital Libraries Group will seek to identify key problems in developing and implementing new digital-based library services, uncover underlying research questions, and undertake collaborative research and development projects which will accelerate the delivery of these services and products, both to Penn and the broader community.

Getting involved

Note: Readers interested in further information, or in participating in the Committee on Electronic Publishing and Interactive Technologies or the other campus groups mentioned, are encouraged to contact the authors (via electronic mail, of course): eleey@crc.upenn.edu or farrington@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.