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The IT Forum:
Preparing for the Revolution Redux
James J. Duderstadt
The University of Michigan
Wm. A. Wulf
National Academy of Engineering
Robert Zemsky
The University of Pennsylvania
Thomas Arrison
National Research Council
Fall, 2005
We live in a time of great change, an increasingly global society, knitted together by pervasive communications and transportation technologies and driven by the exponential growth of new knowledge. It is a time of challenge and contradiction, as an ever-increasing human population threatens global sustainability; a global, knowledge-driven economy places a new premium on workforce skills through phenomena such as off-shoring; governments place increasing confidence in market forces to reflect public priorities even as new paradigms such as open-source technologies challenge conventional free-market philosophies; shifting geopolitical tensions driven by the great disparity in wealth and power about the globe, national security, and terrorism.[1] Yet it is also a time of unusual opportunity and reason for optimism as these same technologies enable the formation of new communities and social institutions, better able to address the needs of our society.
Rapidly evolving information technology has played a particularly important role both in expanding our capacity to generate, distribute, and apply knowledge. This technology is evolving very rapidly, linking people, knowledge, and tools in new and profound ways. It is driving rapid, unpredictable, and frequently disruptive change in existing social institutions. But since information technology can be used to enhance learning, creativity and innovation, intellectual span, and collaboration, it also presents extraordinary opportunities as well as challenges to an increasingly knowledge-driven society.
The implications for discovery-based learning institutions such as the research university are particularly profound. The relationship between societal change and the institutional and pedagogical footing of research universities is clear. The knowledge economy is demanding new types of learners and creators. Globalization requires thoughtful, interdependent and globally identified citizens. New technologies are changing modes of learning, collaboration and expression. And widespread social and political unrest compels educational institutions to think more concertedly about their role in promoting individual and civic development. Institutional and pedagogical innovations are needed to confront these dynamics and insure that the canonical activities of universities – research, teaching and engagement – remain rich, relevant and accessible.
The Impact of Information Technology on the Future of the Research University
It was just such concerns that stimulated the National Academies to launch a major project to understand better how this technology was likely to affect the research university. The premise of the study was a simple one: The rapid evolution of digital technology will present many challenges and opportunities to higher education in general and the research university in particular. Yet there was a sense that many of the most significant issues are neither well recognized nor understood either by leaders of our universities or those who support and depend upon their activities. The first phase of the study was aimed at identifying those technologies likely to evolve in the near term (a decade or less) that might have a major impact on the research university and examining the possible implications of these technology scenarios for the research university.
The steering group for the effort was comprised of leaders from higher education, the chief technology officers of major IT companies, and leaders in national science policy. This group met on numerous occasions over a two-year period to consider these issues, including site visits to major technology laboratories such as Bell Labs and IBM Research Labs and drawing upon the expertise of the National Academy complex. At the end of this period, over one hundred leaders from higher education, the IT industry, and the federal government, and several private foundations convened for a two-day workshop at the National Academy of Sciences to focus this discussion. Beyond the insight brought by these participants, perhaps even more striking was their agreement on a number of key issues.
The first finding was that the extraordinary pace of information-technology evolution is likely not only to continue for the next several decades, possibly even accelerating. Hence, in thinking about changes to the university, one must think about the technology that will be available in 10 or 20 years, technology that will be thousands of times more powerful as well as thousands of times cheaper. The second finding was that the impact of IT on the university is likely to be profound, rapid, and disruptive, affecting all of its activities (teaching, research, service), its organization (academic structure, faculty culture, financing, and management), and the broader higher education enterprise as it evolves toward a global knowledge and learning industry. If change is gradual, there will be time to adapt gracefully, but that is not the history of disruptive technologies. As Clayton Christensen explains in The Innovators Dilemma,[2] new technologies are at first inadequate to displace existing technology in existing applications, but they later explosively displace the application as they enable a new way of satisfying the underlying need.
While it may be difficult to imagine today’s digital technology replacing human teachers, as the power of this technology continues to evolve 100- to 1000-fold each decade, the capacity to reproduce all aspects of human interactions at a distance with arbitrarily high fidelity could well eliminate the classroom and perhaps even the campus as the location of learning. Access to the accumulated knowledge of our civilization through digital libraries and networks, not to mention massive repositories of scientific data from remote instruments such as astronomical observatories or high energy physics accelerators, is changing the nature of scholarship and collaboration in very fundamental ways.
The third finding stresses that although information technology will present many complex challenges and opportunities to universities, procrastination and inaction are the most dangerous courses to follow all during a time of rapid technological change. Attempting to cling to the status quo is a decision in itself, perhaps of momentous consequence.
The first phase of this study, its conclusions, and its recommendations were published in a report, Preparing for the Revolution, available both online and through hard copy from the National Academies Press.[3]
The IT-Forum
More recently, the National Academies have extended this effort to involve directly a large number of research universities by creating a National Academy roundtable on information technology and research universities (“the IT-Forum”) to track the technology, identify the key issues, and raise awareness of the challenges and opportunities. The IT Forum has also conducted a series of workshops for university presidents and chief academic officers in an effort to help them understand better the transformational nature of these technologies and the importance of developing strategic visions for the future of their institutions.
The IT Forum began its activities in spring of 2003 with a day-long workshop involving two dozen presidents and chancellors of major research universities at the spring meeting of the Association of American Universities (AAU). To launch the discussion, Louis Gerstner, retired CEO of IBM, spoke at a dinner meeting the evening before the workshop to share with the presidents some of his own observations concerning leadership during a period of rapid change. The IBM experience demonstrated the dangers of resting on past successes. Instead, leaders need to view information technology as a powerful tool capable of driving a process of strategic change, but only with the full attention and engagement of executive leadership–meaning university presidents themselves.
Noting that university presidents listen most carefully to their own voices, the workshop was organized about several panels of the participating presidents. The first panel was asked to discuss what was currently in their in-out box, the here-and-now issues. These included the usual concerns such as how to meet the seemingly insatiable demand for computing resources (particularly bandwidth), how to pay for this technology, and how to handle privacy and security issues. It is probably no surprise that that most of the presidents believed that they had these issues well in hand–a perception quite different than we were to find with their provosts several months later.
Members of the IT Forum then attempted to move the discussion farther into the future and elevate it to a more strategic level by posing a number of provocative possibilities to the presidents. For example, how would adapt their library planning to the very real possibility that within a decade, the entire Library of Congress (about 10 TB) could be contained in a consumer device about the size of a football (a size university presidents understand well)–or more to the point of students, an iPod? How would the rapid evolution of cyberinfrastructure–the hardware, software, organizations, people, and policy increasing undergirding scientific research–into functionally complete environments for scholarship and learning affect their faculty and students? What if their students utilized IT to take control of their learning environments? These rhetorical hand-grenades triggered a broader discussion of related concerns such as the technological generation gap among students and faculty, the disruptive force of the marketplace brought onto campus by IT, and the disaggregation and reaggregation of the traditional roles and functions of the university.
As the discussions moved on to consider increasingly unpredictable futures, there was a growing recognition of the challenge of providing leadership in the face of such uncertain futures. Finally one of the presidents suggested that he had no idea how presidents were to lead in such a chaotic environment, and that he and his colleagues needed help. Hence, the workshop had managed to bring the presidents through several critical stages: from denial to acceptance to bargaining to seeking help…[4]
The IT Forum followed several months later with a very similar workshop for the provosts of AAU research universities. Again the session began by first asking a panel of provosts to lay out the issues as they saw them at the moment, then to move the discussion to a longer-term perspective, and finally to conclude with a discussions of next steps. The near-term concerns of the provosts were very similar to those of the presidents: network and bandwidth manage, the financing of technology, the protection of security and privacy, and data management and preservation.
Perhaps not surprising was a far greater degree of sophistication among the provosts in understanding and addressing these issues than shown by the presidents, perhaps since as chief academic officers, they were on the front line. But here there was an even more significant difference: unlike the presidents, the provosts recognized (or at least admitted) that these were very difficult issues and that they certainly did not have the answers. The provosts also were willing to discuss issues that would require major cultural changes in their institutions. For example, they expressed growing concern about the degree to which universities were being disadvantaged by the effective monopolies created by IT providers. As one provost put it, universities acted like deer paralyzed in the oncoming headlights, continuing to re-invent the wheel and getting devoured by the marketplace. The provosts were essentially unanimous in their belief that it was time for the universities to set aside their competitive instincts and to build consortia to develop together the technologies to support their instructional, research, and administrative needs through open-source paradigms that would break the stranglehold of the current IT marketplace.
Many provosts suspected that while the faculty believed they knew how their students learned, in reality they had not a clue, particularly in technology-rich environments. This was a theme we were to encounter again and again in our later workshops. The provosts believed that their universities needed far more sophisticated help to understand the learning and cognitive processes characterizing contemporary students, although they also recognized the disruptive nature of these studies which might eliminate over time the rationale for the lecture-classroom paradigm.
In-Depth Meetings
To explore in depth several of the issues raised in the workshops with presidents and provosts, the IT Forum arranged several more focused site visits:
IT-Forum Meeting on “Cognition, Communication, and Communities”
Carnegie-Mellon University (September 5-6, 2003)
To learn more about how learning occurs in technology-intensive environments, the IT Forum held its fall 2003 meeting at Carnegie Mellon University, renown both as one of the nation’s most wired—and now wireless—campuses and also for its strength in the cognitive sciences. As the CMU faculty put it, their students have embraced IT to become a transformative force, frequently forcing the faculty to react to their learning activities. An example is the way students use this technology for communication. From instant messaging to e-mail to blogs to friendster, students are in continual communication with one another, forming learning communities that are always interacting, even in classes (as any faculty member who has been “Googled” can attest). A young professor of physics told us he had been forced to give up trying to teach difficult concepts in his classes. Instead he introduces a topic by pointing to several resources until a few students in the class figure out a way to teach themselves the concept. Then they teach their fellow students, and through peer-to-peer learning, the concepts propagate rapid through the class.
Today’s students are active learners, building their own knowledge structures and learning environments through interaction and collaboration. Their approach to learning is highly nonlinear rather than following the sequential structure of the typical university curriculum. They are adept at multitasking and context switching. And they are challenging the faculty to shift their instructional efforts from the development and presentation of content, which is more readily accessible through the web and open-content efforts such as the Open CourseWare initiative of MIT, and instead become more of a mentor and consultant to student learning.
Some CMU faculty members have concluded that perhaps the best approach in these technology-rich environments is to turn the students loose, letting them define their own learning environments. Peer-to-peer learning is rapidly replacing faculty teaching as the dominant educational process on this technology-rich campus. There is not yet a consensus among the faculty as to where they are headed, but there is strong agreement that the net generation is both challenging and changing the learning process in very fundamental ways.