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Steven E. Hyman, Provost, Harvard University "As provost one of the key issues that I have to think about every day is how we make this more of a cohesive university, that is how do we overcome the centrifugal forces that tend to leave people in intellectual silos. And I think technology has a critical role in that, and it's a very important question, though how technology can help bring us together. "In my view, we went through this incredible period of optimism about what technology could do, and there have been some great successes - I mean online literature searching, the library system, the PubMed system in biological sciences, the pre-print server in physics - these are really wonderful things. I couldn't imagine doing my work without these things. "I remember how much of a waste of time and how frustrating it was smashing books down on a Xerox machine and putting quarters in or getting a new card to permit me a few more photocopies. On the other hand, while we have some of these wonderful applications, a lot of the early promise of technology didn't pan out. "There are a lot of efforts to share lecture materials or whole courses with people in distant sites or alumni that apparently have just not found an audience, and I think part of it is we haven't thought through the way people really work, and for myself... you know I'm very impatient and maybe I'm not typical, but if it takes me more than three or four minutes to access something and it doesn't really work I'm on to the next thing, and fundamentally I'm not going to use my computer terminal and don't want to use my slow printer at home to replace books and manuscripts. "I really need a computer for things that are going to be more... or technology for things that are going to be more interactive, things that allow me to sort of pick and choose and make connections. And I think that one of the things a conference can be useful for is to help us better understand what exactly it is that technology does better than books and other older forms of communications and academic interaction, but I think, again, the idea of technology in connections and community building, not just as a vehicle to push information at people, but actually to get people to sort of log on interact feel a sense of belonging to a certain community, is something that we really would do well to explore and to understand the results really to set up experiments. "You know my view is that it would be good to solve our local problems and learn from them before we take on Harvard and the world. Ultimately I think if we do a good job of understanding of how we really get somebody in the law school and the Kennedy school to become colleagues partly through the use of technology we will have gone a long step to understanding how we connect to people outside. "And in addition this shouldn't be the only experiment that we do - I mean Mark Moore would say, for example, that we should do an experiment connecting the Hauser Center to people working in non-profits around the world and that we would learn from that experiment as well. But I think its important... my view is that we should really pick some experiments and figure out what works, what doesn't work, and generalize from there instead of starting with global ideas imposed top down from some Harvard technology brain trust that don't necessary serve a real need. "Ultimately things that we use are things that serve real needs in our lives, that makes things easier and better at reasonable cost. There are a lot of great contraptions that you can buy on eBay cheap because they were great ideas but they really didn't... nobody really needed them." |
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