I sympathize with Bob's desire for a justification of why the report
talks about some things and not others, but aligning the connectivity
dimension with the discipline specificity dimension doesn't wash.
The bottom line is that discipline-independent technology is
technology that is used in lots of disciplines, and the way that it
comes to be used in lots of disciplines is a complicated mix of
technology, politics, and happenstance.
To cite just a few examples, I can easily imagine symbolic algebra
used in almost any engineering discipline. (There was a nice example
developed at the AI lab last summer using Matlab as an engine to
manipulate the crystallographic groups for the intro materials
subject). And I bet it would be fun to have a haptic force-feedback
interface that lets you "drive" a charge around in a field. And I'm
not sure that the boundary between "multimedia" and "visualization" is
so sharp as to permit such generalizations as saying that
visualization is used primarily in science and multimedia is used in
primarily in humanities.
But this is theology. The real place this will come up is in the
perennial arguments between allocating central funds versus allocating
deartment funds for development of various materials and capabilities.
If the committee is very brave, we might venture some guidelines here,
but I suggest we leave this to the poor souls who will have to make
these choices, and hopef they will have the wisdom not to be wrong
more than 90% of the time.
Where I do think the report needs to be changed (echoing the coments
of Bob and others) is that we need to voice some healthy skepticism
and "dark side of the web" concerns. Otherwise we are being
Pollyana-ish, especially as the inevitable reaction to the Web
over-hype sets in.
Also important is that the long-term recommendation section be recast
more as vision and less as pretense that these are real
recommendations -- and to present some really exciting visions. Dick
has some great stuff that can be used here, and we ought to use it.
-- Hal