(An aside -- as I write my thirteen-year-old son has networked three
computers together here at home, and is running a multi-player game -- Bolo
-- across that mini-network with two of the players being
artificial-intelligence "brains" that he located on Internet and/or America
Online servers and downloaded to his computer, and thence to my desktop
machine and my PowerBook. I helped him not at all to do all this. I'm
simultaneously working on one of the three machines, because it has the
computational power to do several things at once. If we used this
combination of connectivity and computing resources as effectively in MIT
education as my son does in his entertainment, we'd be well on our way.)
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The Committee considered its charge to encompass many advanced
technologies, many more than it could possibly explore in any depth.
Therefore the Committee chose one especially promising and active domain,
the set of communication and display capabilities generally called the
"World Wide Web", for detailed examination. But the broader domain deserves
some attention before we narrow our discussion in this way.
The technologies that serve education have advanced along two somewhat
orthogonal dimensions in recent years. First, computing has advanced --
that is, it has become increasingly easy to process larger quantities of
data and more complex systems in less time with smaller, less expensive
machines. Second, connectivity has advanced -- that is, it has become
possible to move more information from place to place in less time, and
easier to publish, find, and transmit that information from the user's
perspective.
The best current example of advancing computing, at least around MIT, is
the domain generally known as "advanced visualization", whereby one
specifies the full, complex details of an elaborate structure
mathematically and then asks a computer to translate these details into
readily manipulable images. Advanced visualization has become important in
fields ranging from molecular biology to architecture, and very interesting
educational projects are underway in at least five departments at MIT.
Interactive multimedia, such as the projects at MIT variously involving
Shakespeare performance and foreign-language instruction in French,
Spanish, and Japanese, also falls into this domain, as do the extensive
statistical tools undergraduates in Economics and Political Science now use
routinely and the symbolic-mathematics tools that pervade Engineering and
Science subjects. Although there are wonderful examples of technology
advancing along this dimension, we do not focus on them in this report.
The best current example of advancing connectivity is the collection of
protocols, network facilities, servers, and browsers called the "World Wide
Web". Servers make it simple for materials to be "published" over the
network, technical and economic trends have encouraged dramatic expansion
of that network, browsers make it simple for users to request and view
documents and other materials, and relatively simple protocols help
everything work together. There are other examples of advancing
connectivity, such as the increasing availability and use of video
conferencing and other visual networking, but the World Wide Web captures
the wonders and perils of advancing connectivity so well that we have
chosen to concentrate on it in this report.
Of course the most interesting advanced technologies combine progress along
both dimensions. It's increasingly feasible to contemplate a user locating
information on a remote server, displaying it with a local browser, and
then manipulating the information using another remote server with almost
unimaginable computing power. Or we can contemplate truly interactive
multimedia experiences distributed over the network rather than confined to
local machines. The Athena Computing Environment and several departmental
facilities have helped translate computing advances into educational
advances; we believe that it's time to see commensurate translation of
connectivity advances into educational advances, in the hope that these two
dimensions of progress will combine synergistically into great leaps
forward for MIT education.
We realize that in, say, ten years the specific technologies available may
look quite different from today's. We hope in this report to lay foundation
not only for the increased use of current advanced technologies, but also
future ones.
The World Wide Web
This page summarizes...
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