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© 1993
A Reality Check on Cyberspace: John V. Lombardi Statewide High Technology Conference, Tallahassee, October 1993. Versions published in "Point of View," The Chronicle of HIgher Education, and The Edutech Report, The Education Technology Newsletter for Faculty and Administrators, 9:12, 1994; and in museletter, University of Florida, 1994 Most of us here believe in cyberspace. We want to believe in cyberspace. We imagine the day we can jack into cyberspace. With the enthusiasm of converts we thrill to the cyberpunk worlds of William Gibson' s Neuromancer (1984) and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1993). We listen to the visionary tales of the technical gurus who dazzle us with promises of interactive, real-time video with T-3 connectivity and describe a virtual reality using multimedia and compressed audio-video. What wonderful words, they sound so good as we wrap our lips around them. Just string them together and say them all in one heady rush of multisyllabic glory: interactive, real-time, video with universal connectivity in a multimedia-based virtual reality using T-3 connectivity and compressed audio-video technology. The Future: What a rush! Then we go home, turn on the television, and watch the home shopping network. We channel surf the existing airwaves, sliding across the likes of MTV and VH-1, the Nashville Network with dumb video of endless line dancing, or the numbing intensity of stand-up evangelists preaching the 24-hour gospel. We cruse by the grainy, hand-held reality shows with voyeuristic scenes of violence and crime and the endless mindless talk and confession shows. Throughout, each show comes interspersed with intense, high production value commercials. As we skim through our many channels, some of us, the self-identified intellectual elite, stop for a peaceful moment to watch a televised opera, a toney period-piece drama, or an unintelligible British-accented comedy in sepia-toned elegance on Public Television, and then, having paid our sophistication dues, we quickly flip to Silk Stalkings or some other low budget clone of Miami Vice. This is the real world of pre-cyberspace video. The techno-junkies among us know better than to waste time with this passive video, they jump on their computer keyboards limber up their mice and rush headlong into the Internet, pursuing information and communication in the still clumsy electronic world of Gopher and Veronica. Here, the magic of the insider, the expert remains intact. No fool couch-potato can possibly navigate the arcana of the Internet, no simple citizen can make an anonymous FTP work, no simpleton can slip gracefully through the infinitely complex linkages of multivendor email systems or conflicting protocol converters, routers, bridges, and the other primitive but fun stuff of the techno magicians of our time. What fun to lurk on bulletin boards, slipping in and out of the semi-public conversations of network administrators and techno freaks discussing the peculiarities of ATM and gigabit transfer protocols. This kind of technical evangelism spills over into the rhetoric of the megabusiness executives of cyberspace whose enthusiasm might lead you to think the new world of virtual communication lies just around the corner; that the marriage of telephone, television, and computers will bring us into a brave new world within the next few years. Those of us reared on vaporware, the battle-scarred veterans of the microcomputer wars, the gun-shy non-combatants in the guerrilla campaigns of incompatible operating systems, clone processors, and buggy software, we look on all this with some skepticism.
I have to confess to you that I also am a true believer. I know cyberspace will be with us some day. I know the knowledge is there, the science exists, the basic physics has been solved. All that remains are the grubby details of implementation. They tell me that the mere technical problems will disappear and the new era can begin because our leaders and our government have a clear vision, our regulators show remarkable wisdom, and our consumers demonstrate great eagerness. Since this is a conference of dreamers and visionaries, I come to you as a ruthless pragmatist, an unimaginative worker-bee in search of things that work, looking for ideas and products that make my job easier, that make my enterprise better, and that, God willing, make some money for my people. I don't know anything about the technical wonders of ATM, T-3, video compression, or protocols. So let me leave that for the other sessions and speakers at this conference who do know something. Instead, let me think out loud about education and especially about university education in this brave new cyberworld. I read about lots of good electronic stuff and I see lots of truly awesome demonstrations. But then I've been seeing good stuff and awesome demonstrations since the invention of television and the creation of the personal computer. I remember how we got up at the crack of dawn in the late 1950s to watch a television show that taught physics before we went off to high school each morning. The teacher lectured from a podium and wrote formulas, graphs, and other things on the blackboard. He was very good, and we learned a lot, even in black and white. Yesterday, I tuned into one of our University of Florida courses on television and I saw the professor standing at a podium lecturing and writing formulas, graphs and other things on the blackboard. She was very good, and in living color. Why didn't I see snazzy audio-video effects, why in my endless channel surfing don't I find educational programs with multimedia good news at least as fancy as a rock video, why can't I find real education done with the production values of a mini-series or a wildlife documentary? While I can find some specialized things like super duper displays of the National Gallery of Art and the complete bibliography of social science on CD ROM, these represent only reference materials and not education itself. I've worried about all this for many years because I want to believe. I want to recognize snazzy educational technology as the wave of the future. I want to justify the huge expense and the incredible amount of time required to do multimedia applications. I want to find a way to get the toys and build the educational applications. But when I take my reality pills (they don't last long and they can become highly addictive if used too often), I get a brief flash from the alternate reality universe, a low-rent district of cyberspace. Let's imagine that our huge conglomerates of cable, telephone, entertainment companies, and the other players with real money manage to build the network we know we need for the future. Let's suppose that the network brings us 500 channels with endless choices into the home or office and creates an almost infinite set of alternatives for consumers. What will we in the education business do with all that space? Will we build complicated, high technology, technically sophisticated products to put into that space? I think not. I think just the reverse will happen. Today we have only a very limited version of cyberspace which makes it a very scarce commodity. TV, telephone, and network access permit only a few channels and little opportunity for the enduser to manipulate the channels. So, this scarce resource can only support mostly high profit, high value activities. When a half-minute of TV advertising time on the night of the superbowl costs on the order of 800,000 dollars, only the highest production values and highest audience shares justify the expense. In the future, however, when cyberspace is like the American frontier in the last half of the nineteenth century, wide open and virtually free for the taking, we will have room for low cost, small audience, high intensity activity. University education, whether the generic undergraduate curriculum or the most specialized advanced training program in scientific analysis, requires little technical sophistication to deliver. The value of the education is not in the gimmickry that surrounds it but in the content that informs it. A college education gains its effectiveness and its power from the opportunity to hear and understand the teacher. Knowledge exists everywhere, and were it just knowledge that mattered in education, we would simply ship out the CD ROM and let you take the examinations. But that's not the point at all. Education teaches us the process of learning, it shows us what to do with information, it leads us to an understanding of how to choose which information is important for what purpose, it requires an understanding of how we organize and structure information. The classroom context of American higher education succeeds not because of its efficiency in presenting information, but because of its efficiency in teaching people how to approach information. In combination with other academic exercises, the classroom creates an artificial space of its own where students and teacher reinvent the process that creates and organizes the knowledge we need. This activity we call a university education requires a lot of investment and creativity, it requires a faculty with high quality training and endless years of study and research, it demands laboratories, libraries and books, term papers and examinations, but it doesn't necessarily require high tech delivery of its principal messages. If you will give me the benefit of the doubt on this for a moment, let's see what this means for the emerging cyberspace. For the first years (probably a decade) we'll have lots of bandwidth from the expansion of television and telephony. We will all have to learn how to channel surf not 30 channels but 500 channels or more. But what will we find on those channels? Some new entertainment programs, some new evangelical experiences, some new talk shows, of course. But if we're smart in the universities, and if we can get our corporate partners to come down from the clouds of super-hype, we have ready-made in our colleges and universities all over the country an extraordinary quantity of high-quality programming ready to be put into the bandwidth at very little cost. Each of our colleges and universities has curricula that could appear on the air tomorrow with the cost of a modest camera and audio pick-up. Each of us could adapt that curricula to take advantage of various forms of two way audio video for another modest investment. This isn't high tech, this isn't virtual recreation of the Roman Empire, this isn't a simulation of the atomic structure of an atom on the sun, this is simply the classroom projected in its rough reality into the cyberspace. We don't need to reinvent the curriculum or the knowledge or the teacher. We only need to open the classroom to cyberspace and allow folks to tune in or out as they see fit. This is cheap to do, we could deliver the entire curriculum of a small college into cyberspace for what it costs to produce a couple of episodes of Deep Space 9. Because the cost of inserting education into cyberspace is so cheap and the potential bandwidth so large and sparsely occupied at the beginning, we don't need huge audiences to make it work. Because the bandwidth of the networks we likely will see in the near term will be so large, we need not worry about the size of our audiences. Fifty people watching on television, in addition to the fifty in class, will be fine. As time goes on, we'll develop more and more sophistication in our cyber classes, we'll introduce real-time questioning when the technology becomes cheap, we'll add electronically monitored tests, we'll invent simulated experiments for laboratory classes, and we'll do drills for foreign language over the network. But we don't need to do any of that to start. How do we get this started? How do we begin? It's simple, someone with money has to believe in the substance of cyberspace as well as the hype and the technology. Sure, we need to solve the switching problem, the protocol problem, the video compression problem, and all those other nifty high tech issues. Sure we have to figure out who will own cyberspace and how we'll charge the users for access to it. But all that is just the infrastructure. Unless we have something to put into cyberspace that has substance, all the technology in the world won't produce much value. Our business leaders, even in their most visionary modes, haven't thought beyond the struggle to buy up every old television show, every movie inventory, every rerun of quiz programs at huge costs. These are dead inventories of unchanging programming often empty of any real value. They could buy the continuously updated and living inventory of programming that exists at every decent college and university in America if they had the imagination to see the value. Of course, even for the evangelists of cyberspace, it's easier to look backward into the dead inventory of the past rather than forward into the ever changing living inventory of the future in the colleges and universities. By buying into the projection of education into cyberspace, we could not only fill the bandwidth but we could address some of the educational problems that plague our country. We know we don't have enough room in quality colleges and universities, we know that some schools have environments hostile to education, we know that many of our students cannot have access to enough of our best teachers, we know many universities have entrance standards too high for many capable students or cost too much for others. Can cyber education solve all the educational problems of America? Of course not. But the availability of cyber education at all levels would surely open up access, it would reduce the economic barriers to learning, and it would encourage universities and schools to find ways to speak to larger, more extended audiences. The colleges and universities, however, can't do this by themselves. We've already invested in the quality teachers, the design of the curriculum, the construction of the courses, the organization of the lectures and laboratories and readings and discussions. We do it very well. We are the best in the world at this, and we've paid for it out of the funds provided by states, parents, students, and donors. We have made our investment in the programming required for a useful contribution to the cyberspace. Like the movie inventories now up for bid, we've produced the show; but unlike them our show continues to change and improve over time. Recognizing the power of education, it now reverts to the gurus and visionaries of the networks and the people's representatives in the legislatures and governor's offices to set aside some tiny fraction of their programming investment dollars to pay for the cost of projecting the classroom into cyberspace. Don't ask for huge proposals, don't require completely integrated, large scale activities with elaborate rationales and reinvented curricula. Instead, simply say, "Make me an offer to put your first two years of business school curriculum on the air." We'll make you that offer, and it will be cheap relative to what it will cost you to design a fragment of the special switches needed to run the network or what you will pay for the same number of hours of stale reruns of old sitcoms. We'll run it for three years, we'll evaluate the results and if it doesn't work, we'll do something else. Given our success with stand-up classroom instruction using the blackboard, one camera, and one microphone, I guarantee we will succeed and, moreover, what we do will be a whole lot more useful and valuable than ten more channels of home shopping. So, as we celebrate the new and the wonderful, as we dive into the cyber future with the abandon of the newly converted, as we reinvent everything, let's keep a small point of reality intact. Let's put education on screen and on net, not in a radically reconstructed and reinvented way, but simply as a projection of the already effective methods we now have. Let's do it now, let's do it quickly, and then, when cyberspace and virtual reality become universally available, we can let go of this solid piece of the real world that is American higher education and truly float free into the brave new cyber world. Thank you. |
