Austin, Texas
May 18-20, 1994
James O'Donnell
University of Pennsylvania
I propose to address two questions here: Where are we going and when did we get there? They are carefully phrased, and I am aware of the ambiguity of the sequence in presenting those questions in that way.
We live, in many respects, in a pioneering time when various and sundry explorers are spreading out over parts of the map, the new "True West," where new information frontiers lie. I want to begin with a short report from the part of the frontier where I have been lately. I will address the implications of that frontier, and then pull back further to a larger resource of information, and place this experience in the wider trajectory of development.
During the last semester I engaged in teaching one of the first courses of its kind--taught not only to real, as we call them, "live ware" students in the classroom, but also to another 375 students whom we call, for want of a better word, "net ware." I suppose we should refer to all of them together as "smart ware" in this process, because they are very smart people indeed.
It was an idea that came to me because I wanted make a better course for ten "real live" University of Pennsylvania students who would come into my classroom. I noticed that I regularly spent hours and hours a day in dialogue with dozens of people in other kinds of places in the world, using the technology. And the insight--rather like that of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland of the old movies who decided to put on a show--was if I could bring together some of those people far, far away with the ten students in the classroom, the interaction would be mutually beneficial for all participants. I am happy to report that it improved most dramatically for the students who were in the classroom. Suddenly they had 375 colleagues spread around the world with a variety of levels of professionalism, a variety of points of national origin and cultural origin. These courses became richer intellectual, and more literary experiences.
For me a defining moment was when one of our listserv members--a teacher of medieval Christian philosophy in Istanbul--reported on a talk given by a Franciscan priest to the department of philosophy in her institution, in which he expounded on certain aspects of medieval Christian philosophy. And the faculty of the institution, some of whom were Islamic, scratched their beards after the lecture and said, "Well, it's all very interesting but it is a shame, is it not, that Christianity is not a truly rational religion like Islam?" Besides the cultural questions of whose religion is more or less rational, it did my students in the city of Philadelphia a lot of good. We were reminded suddenly, that whatever debates we were having about the argument, coherence of thought would be put in an environment, not necessarily Islam.
Closer to home, similar kinds of recontextural teams were possible. In the traditional model of the professor teaching a course, there is one professor and a lot of students, and the professor, of course, knows absolutely everything. Which means that if you ask him about a theory and he has an answer for you, he has a pretty good idea just how inadequate that answer may be. But because he is the one who knows everything--he is the only professor in the room--the chances are you write down what he says and go away leaving it, but quoting it years later.
My students were able, instead, to ask that question in a room where I could give my inadequate answer and then present that inadequate answer in front of an audience of people inadequately; those who had adequate answers came back online. It gave my students a binocular or trinocular view of a subject where they otherwise had only the monocular view of the total perception.
Now, what we were doing involved, as I said, "smart ware." A lot of "dumb ware" was also involved. By "dumb ware" I mean the technology we were using. I want to emphasize that the technology we were using was nothing special. We put together an email list served by software. We put information on the Gopher. About halfway through the semester, the World Wide Web revolution tapped our shoulders, and we started putting together home pages of information. None of this is technologically sophisticated. All of it was--traditionally, it is said now--being done through our department 20 years ago, and if you want to know what you are going to be doing 20 years from now, you should indeed be with Xerox PARC.
It was not a question of something technologically innovative. It was a question of doing what our colleague Dave Rogers likes to call "social work," to adapt the technology to the possibility of the institutional agenda that we already have. It also means thinking about ways in which to do our day job better, taking the desire faculty have for doing their teaching and research, and finding ways to get more power out of the environment.
One important thing that I found I did early on--rather nervously, and it worked--was something that I had learned to do many years ago through reading the writings of Marshall McLuhan. The principle is that "the content of the new medium is always an old medium." One of his versions was this: when you invented motion pictures, the first thing you did was you put a camera in front of people putting on a play and you thought you were transmitting a play to the world. It took another 75 or 100 years before the possibility of MTV videos occurred to you and you began generally to use that technology to its fullest potential.
I was nervous about using email lists for this seminar, because the Internet world is full of lists of discussions, even on very academic subjects, that have a very low signal-to-noise ratio. I expect in my classroom at least a moderate, maybe 50/50, signal-to-noise ratio--with what I was going to be doing for them, maybe even a little higher--and I was worried about what happens to discussions. Would it turn a discussion into a religious flame war with people pounding on their various theological tables? So I wrote a little message that went out at the very beginning of the seminar--the syllabus-bibliography-introductory information. Then I wrote my "rules of procedure, " changing the title of the file to "Rules of Procedure, or No Spit Wads, Quiet in the Back." By doing that, I was deliberately attempting to transfer something of the institutional culture of the traditional classroom to the Internet discussion list. This reminded people that they have some idea what a professor is and what a seminar is and that what we would be doing in this Internet environment would be a form of play acting--that kind of "seminar experience," with new technology and new possibilities of communication--to see what would emerge.
Because I was nervous about what would happen, I began the semester with instructions to take an unmoderated to a moderated list. At a moment's notice I was prepared to shut down the list and be detached entirely from the classroom course. The process did not work. I did not need to. In fact, I am now inclined to think that by huffing and puffing as much as I did about spit wads and keeping quiet in the back, I may have suppressed the discussion a little bit more than I wanted to. I was looking carefully into the future to just how much of the traditional seminar environment I wanted to carry over and just how much I wanted to begin to chip away at the decorum and the restraint of the traditional environment. I wanted to encourage the kinds of discussions that perhaps have not been had in a single room on a single day with a time limit of a couple of hours.
I am happy to say the experiment will continue. I have had approval last week from the University of Pennsylvania to do a course in the fall semester, "Fall and Consolation of Prometheus"--one of the shaping texts for religion--for which we will be able to sell credit. You can register for the course anywhere on the globe, for which we get a tuition check for $800. You will get four graduate level credits from the University of Pennsylvania and a transcript you can put to work. I have a particular pre-electronic social agenda of work there; providing sufficient continuing education for the high school Latin teachers of this world is a continuing question for those of us who are classicists. We want those teachers to do a good job. We want them to be electronically refreshed. But we also know many of them teach in places where the kinds of courses they can take for upgrading their certification are more likely to be in advanced pedagogy theory, and they have taken all those by now and are beginning to be frustrated.
I hope that we can begin to deliver an experience that has previously been for the few. You can get to those few places where we do it. We want to deliver the kind of experience and revitalization to teachers who find themselves in geographically or culturally remote locations or to people who simply do not have the time or economic resources to go to summer courses or an institution close at hand that provides them courses in the evening.
What do we make of this kind of environment? What is going on out here on the frontier? You will notice that I have made no mention of several of those traditions for higher education: universities, libraries, or publishers. Which, if any, of those institutions do we need to continue this kind of education? I am going to be doing this course in the fall through the University of Pennsylvania, but I had email, just as I was coming to this agreement with the university, from something calling itself "Virtual Online University," which is two guys on a workstation who claim that they will be accredited in the fall semester. I am not quite sure how they are accredited. They claim they can offer courses in the fall semester from faculties from all over North America--tuition $150--with easier and more transparent software and less institutional bureaucracy to make it happen.
The old model of university education, consisting of a hard copy from one end of the log and the student on the other end of the log, threatens more students to go sit at the terminal and write to the student sitting at another terminal station, without the institutional superstructure we have managed to build over time.
I would suggest to our universities, libraries, and publishers all the various ways viable in this kind of environment. We can see their traditional roles "through a mirror darkly." Each of them can succeed and make themselves perfect, or nearly so, in the intellectual culture and future that we face. But the optimistic method that needs to be underlined is that these are also renewable resources. My own judgment is that universities and professors are the most threatened of these resources. Perhaps we will indeed need professors. But we may also discover that we have overbuilt and are top-heavy in the number of kinds of professors that we have. If we manage to deliver information and instruction more economically to a wider audience and a wider geographic range, we may find out that we do not need quite so many of us. That is threatening.
It raises a social question: How else can you find serious research that our society judges it needs? Much research that has been done since World War II is the most advanced research in our society and has been positive and rich, but it will need attending to in the years to come.
The place of publishers in the information environment that comes before us is less ambiguous and less threatened than that of universities and professors, but it is still dangerous. Publishers have been, over the last 500 years, the most democratic form of interface that we have been able to achieve for the creation and distribution of information. A management of that interface through the economics of capitalism has worked remarkably well. But a new economic environment, as Richard Lanham was just describing, for what was once the most democratic form can turn it into an elitist model. If you need to put out large quantities of information but limit users getting into the information, then indeed only the rich will be informed and society will be poorer. Whether the publishing profession manages to find a way to be keep its edge in the democratic and universal provision of information is one of the most interesting questions and the most widely open question in this whole environment.
I spend a fair amount of time associating with librarians these days for one good reason: I am betting on you folks to be the ones that endure the longest. If I hang around with some of you, perhaps I will also endure. The traditional skills librarians have in building gateways is something you have been doing for a very long time. You have all had gateways to information of one kind or another, usually very close to the front door of your library building. You are good at organizing and providing means of access. A synergy between the library community and the kind of visualization techniques that Cathy Marshall was talking about seems to be the most powerful opportunity that the librarian faces. It certainly comes at a time when librarians have more to say than Richard II's part.
If that is where we are going, when did we get there? What is it going to look like when we tell the story of the history of the introduction of national information provided for the serious needs for our society?
I believe that when the story comes to be written, the decisive moment will be an episode that occurred a few miles outside of Washington, DC, sometime ago. There were work crews preparing the technical foundations for what was going to be a grand attention-getting media stunt, but it was not working. They were trying to lay some cable, and the equipment simply was not functioning in the way that it should be. It was not clear that the structure that they had designed was going to work. So the man who sold them the cable-laying equipment deliberately but unobtrusively wrecked the equipment. He did that so that they would reconsider their technological sources without attracting the attention of the national media, who were following this series very closely. He went away that night and had one stroke of technical insight, which in retrospect seems quite clear, obvious, and anything but dramatic, but which made it possible, indeed, the very next day to begin putting together the infrastructure. The media stunt went off on time. The salesman himself ran into a small venture capital start-up operation a few years later that became the national leader of its field in a very short time, and he made piles and piles of money.
It is a very familiar kind of story, and I think you recognize all the of the elements of it. You are probably wondering who I am talking about. You may be surprised when I say the person I had in mind who built this was a technological leader, a man named Ezra Cornell. Ezra Cornell was a plow salesman that sold a plow to Samuel W. Morse to lay cable from Washington to Baltimore. It was not working--the wires were breaking underground. It was Ezra Cornell who had the idea of stringing wires instead from glass insulators on top of wooden poles. The media stunt that he was facilitating was Morse's transmission of messages from Baltimore to Washington, "What hath God wrought?" I find it interesting that, within a week of the 150th anniversary of May 24, 1844, no one has taken notice of it in the mass media. We have forgotten Samuel W. Morse and that technologic innovator. I had to go back to old biographies--one written about 150 years ago, that comes under the discreetly ambitious title of "American Leonardo"--to find that out.
It may sound audacious to say that that is the moment at which we began to build financial interhighways. But 150 years from now, that will seem to be the time when information began to move around this country at the speed of light. The distance between Samuel W. Morse's telegraph to the things seen on videos today is really much smaller than the distance between the telegraph and the postal system of the 1840s. The greatest jump in one's magnitude is moving to put information in motion in this way. My point in saying this is to try to give us a little perspective on who we are and where we are. The late twentieth century will not, in the long run, turn out to be quite as interesting to historians as to ourselves.
It will turn out that we are not living in the age of a precedent. We are living in a time, rather, where the tools to do the things we have been trying to do for the last 150 to 2,000 years are being put into our hands. In many respects, my experience with the Augustine seminar is one that transfers. We do not need specific technology so much as we need resourceful adaptations of technology and of the social, intellectual, and cultural systems that we find ourselves managing. It is a challenge to institutional evolution.
We can find that the second 150 years of new information revolution will be as productive, exciting, and fruitful for our culture as the last 150 years have been if we use that rearview mirror productively to imagine how we can carry over old-fashioned notions like libraries, seminars, professors, and publishers into the newer environment. This must be done while selectively looking forward from time to time to see where we are and using a combination of timing, innovation, and resourceful adaptation of that vision to the cultural and social structures that we have. Again, I hope to see you there.