Looking Inward

What does it mean to be a member of the Harvard community? To what extent is physical immersion necessary?

What's the minimum physical presence that a student or faculty member needs to be part of Harvard?

Sometimes, our students say, "If it's not online, it doesn't exist." What does that bode for our students (and our ways of teaching)?

What are the most promising experiments underway that use the Internet to build intellectual community at Harvard?

How are we using new technologies to teach our students at Harvard? Should we allow the boundaries around Harvard faculty and Harvard students to blur? For example, should Harvard students be permitted to "cross register" into an online course offered by a Stanford professor? Should Stanford students be permitted to "cross register" into an online course offered by a Harvard professor? Should Harvard faculty and Stanford faculty be encouraged to use the Internet to co-teach online courses to classes consisting partly of Harvard students and partly of Stanford students?

Is it possible to build broad-scale institutional commitment to specific technology initiatives and mobilize the Harvard community around our goals?

How should the University use technology to continue to engage alumni in our community?

How do we capture the richness of the resident experience and our work on our campuses in a way that will attract, retain, and interest our alumni?

Live Audience Questions:

Maybe the focus should be on inter-school and inter-organization communication WITHIN the university should be our first focus, and then we can worry about the relationship to Harvard in the wider world. Think globally, act locally.

Sarah - 11-15-2002 20:31:08

Should Harvard have a universal IT strategy and, if so, what should its major thrust be?

Jason Jay - 11-15-2002 20:21:55

The Harvard Graduate School of Education seems to have as a central mission the bridging of socioeconomic and ethnic gaps, increasing the equity of American public education. "Standardized test" is a dirty word there. At the same time, Harvard as a whole is a tremdnously exclusive university with a very narrow definition of potential students - this serves as a narrow sorting mechanim that encourages standardized, elitist K-12 education. Could reaching out to wider student populations on the net serve to decrease the filtering pressure of Harvard and thereby allow for more egalitarian, individualized K-12 education?

Mark Dulcey - 11-15-2002 20:22:52

How will this system of "superstars" affect the inequality of income? Will it lead to a few people getting rich at the expense of the rest of society?

Isaac - 11-15-2002 20:19:14

Isn't the real question not whether digital learning is better than traditional learning but whether digital learning is better than no learning? Isn't it most valuable -- and unquestionably value -- for those who have no other access to the knowledge shared?

Isaac - 11-15-2002 20:15:11

Isn't the point with the failure of educational TV that TV only works one way? Content is pushed out to the viewer, but there is no opportunity for the viewers to participate. Isn't the real opportunity for digital education -- or distance learning -- just the opposite? We can recreate in a digital medium just the shared experience you describe at a football game or movie theater?

Stacy Wolfson - 11-15-2002 20:15:47

What do you see as the impacts of MIT's OpenCourseWare, both on Harvard and on other universities?

Mark Dulcey - 11-15-2002 19:59:42

Educational television was one-way. The Internet is not. Is that a large enough change to make Internet education a success? Is the quality of net interaction high enough for successful education?

Ernie Anderson - 11-15-2002 19:12:46

Since Education is one of the areas most impacted by the Internet, and considering Harvard's School of Education leading (if not sustained) ventures in this arena, e.g. new teachers on-line support group, one of the first public school computer cooperatives, why is the School of Education not more visible in the IS2K2 program? The HGSE Learning Technologies Center must be worthy of significant notice.

Jason Jay - 11-15-2002 21:50:19

Why isn't icommons available as a tool for students? Why is it limited to faculty? Harvard students could use icommons to build community, whether in student groups, community organizations, or lecture courses that do not use digital tools.

anonymous - 11-15-2002 21:38:23

Provost Hyman indiicates that there is no "top down," srtategy, apart from insitence on internal communiction? How is this communication possile without madated standards? Different servers, applications. Trouble!

David Abrams - 11-15-2002 21:40:28

My understanding is that MIT OpenCourseWare still uses tradional textbooks in many courses and student buy books just like the students taking the course in person. It is an attempt to put the portions of the coursework that occurs in Cambridge on the web soit canbe access from anywhere. It is not obvious why this initiative does not work with normal textbooks.

layman - 11-15-2002 21:34:18

for the person in the audience who is here to, not to see a showcase of harvard abilities, but to see how harvard's achievements in the field of online learning can be transposed to a more intimate setting such as highschools or afterschool programs. what are the bottomline cost of some of these online tools and how large of an IT department does it take to create (and time to do so)?

Jason Jay - 11-15-2002 21:32:51

Integration of HBS materials into single portal is one step, but what about Harvard-wide? Right now an ambitious cross-registrant will have MyGSE, MyKSG, MyHarvard, MyHBS, MyYahoo, etc. The number of different web sites that require visiting has become overwhelming. A meta-portal, or truly my.harvard strategy is due.

J. Lester - 11-15-2002 21:23:30

Students get to take home their textbooks after they graduate. Is there a strategy to allow students after they leave Harvard to still have access to these online educational resources?

John - 11-15-2002 21:13:20

Q for Jack Spengler...you said you created your own software to do the panoramic image display, but there is already commercial software (e.g., Quicktime VR) to do exactly what you demonstrated. Why did you create your own software from scratch?

Ernie Anderson - 11-15-2002 21:17:35

Have you made use of, or thought seriously about, PDA's for student use in class/lab/homework?

Barbara Hunt - 11-15-2002 21:15:49

Could one or more of the speakers address the time, cost, staffing, and other resources they found necessary to develop their respective Web sites to become the teaching tools that we are seeing in this program?

Ed - 11-15-2002 21:03:29

Do alumni have access to the websites you demonstrated (Compounded Interest, Net Present Value, etc.)?

Ernie Andrson - 11-15-2002 21:07:34

What has not seemed to come across, at least so far, is the ability to interact with a student having trouble with a problem. A statistics problem,for instance, when the Professor could log on to the student's account and help him work it through step by step. Harvard's classes might be too big for such individual attention? Problems assigned do not lend themselves to such individual help? Ability to use a 'learning commnity' concept and have students help each other?

Jason Jay - 11-15-2002 20:52:46

Are these animations and resources available to the web at large, or only from the FAS network? Who makes decisions about access?