1. A multimedia support group. Penn State has a wonderful group that works
with faculty to craft multimedia instructional extravaganzas. Some of the
products are successful and some aren't, but having the support group means
that faculty try things they otherwise wouldn't, and thereby learn over time
what works and what doesn't. I wish we had such a group here. We have people
who can do this -- some even work for me -- but they also have to do many
other things, and can't pry loose the time serious multimedia design &
execution takes.
2. Fast network to the desktop. Unless we commit to fast network to the
desktop (on the order of 100Mbps, rather than the 10Mbps we routinely provide
today), many things worth doing won't be possible. For example, Peter's
Shakespeare stuff begs for networking -- especially if it could be combined
with NEOS-style collaboration and exchange -- but satisfactory performance
demands greater bandwidth everywhere than we now have. This will cost serious
money, which has to come from somewhere.
3. Generic structure-building tools. Many pieces of our curriculum center on
structures: bridges, buildings, molecules, dramas, economic models, you name
it. It would be wonderful to have a generic capability to specify structures,
including exogenous and endogenous parameters, and then to visualize and
manipulate these structures and share the results widely. Today various
courses use, for example, AutoCAD and rendering software to do this with
buildings, BioSym to do this for molecules, and various more specialized tools
to do it in more narrow circumstances. In effect, we need the spatial
equivalent of Maple and Mathematica.
4. Truly common storage. Unless there's a central place anyone can put
something and anyone else can get it, provided both parties to the transaction
are using some "reasonable" machine, realizing the full potential of both
network and multimedia will be very difficult. This requires both protocol and
technical work.
5. Ubiquitous computer possession. This relates closely to #2 and #4. Unless
everyone has his or her own "reasonable" computer connected to a fast network,
we can't expect students or faculty to spend the kind of time with multimedia
materials that educational effectiveness demands. So we have to provide every
student and faculty member a "reasonable" computer and upgrade it as required.
Whether we add the resulting costs to tuition, or implicitly do so by
requiring ownership, is an implementation question. But so long as we rely on
shared seats for basic computer and network service, we can't expect the kind
of use or effects we're talking about. We'll still need shared seats even if
everyone has a computer, but those shared seats will have special capabilities
rather than basic ones.
gj
e40-359a/MIT/Cambridge MA 02139
voice: (617) 253-3712
fax: (617) 258-8736
url: http://web.mit.edu/user/g/j/gjackson/www/home.html