Daniel Atkins: Thank you very much. I think we're here in part because of the belief that there's a huge vector of technological opportunities and social imperatives that will affect many knowledge-intensive organizations, including the university. So we're at a time of reflection on potential massive change. What I thought I would do in about five minutes is suggest that at any point of change there are usually opportunity sides to change and then there are danger sides to change. Let me just sketch for purposes of discussion what some of the opportunity and danger issues might be for the future of universities or higher education.

Let's start on the opportunity side, or what I would argue might be the responsibility side, if you're into noblesse oblige and you think of Michigan as a great university. Initially computers found their way into academia primarily for scientific and engineering modeling, simulation, and that of course has continued to be a powerful use of computers, and in fact there's a great deal more potential for simulating complex systems and now visualizing and interacting with them, up to and including immersive reality-of-the-cave kind of technology that was mentioned yesterday. Of course, the example that John Ashworth just gave of visualization of historic documents in alternate forms that are available through digital is another good example.

Another opportunity is to explore the digital media, which has this property of digital coherence, so that formats that have traditionally been separate - text, audio, image, now algorithms in the form of Java applets and so forth - are now coming together to create new creative, expressive media. We at Michigan, for example, are experimenting with that kind of thing in the context of our Media Union on the North Campus that represents a unique interdisciplinary activity between engineering, art, architecture, music and so forth.

We've talked a bit about the impact on publishing. There is a retrospective and a prospective dimension to that. The retrospective is the extent to which we should transform the print-on-paper objects into digital objects and share and use them in new ways. But as I also mentioned yesterday, this same digital coherence is creating entirely new genres, new document forms. It remains to be seen what new properties these documents have, but people are speculating that they are sufficiently interactive and experiential, that they might appeal to a broader set of learning. The interaction with these documents might, in some sense, substitute for interaction with the professor in the classroom. That's a bet at least some people are placing.

This lightweight publishing the digital world makes available that's already been mentioned as a way that, for example, we can take back the intellectual property and avoid some of what some people consider the exploitive, particularly sci-tech publishing, mechanisms that we have.

Yesterday we talked a lot about the collaboratory. I think the key issue there is that this technology shows the possibility of providing many more people much more authentic experiences. My thinking on a lot of these topics has been strongly shaped by John Seely Brown's writings on the future of the university in the digital age, where he stresses that the university is fundamentally about a knowledge creation and dissemination community. So the questions are can this technology be used to reinforce the knowledge creation community to allow it to occur in new, more agile distance-independent forms, and can we provide our students and our faculty more authentic experiences earlier in their careers? This property of distance independence, of course, brings up the question of the university reaching out beyond its geographic boundaries, of the provision of lifelong learning opportunities, and so forth.

There are also, of course, a host of new academic fundamental research issues that are imposed and emerge from this, that create new objects of study and objects of exploration for universities and potentially, as in the case of School of Information, new professional specializations and so forth. So that's some of the opportunity side of this.

On the danger and competition side, as we get into these new, more experiential genres, and these distance-independent ways of building and sustaining knowledge communities, we have the potential for creating economies of scale and reduced barriers of entry. For example, the need not to build a huge physical plant or a huge infrastructure based on a physical plant, which is causing many others, including the for-profit world, to consider and in fact begin entry into the provision of higher education. So this same distance-independent technology that allows, for example, the University of Michigan to reach out and offer its services or takes the services of remote people also provides others the opportunity to literally establish competition in our own backyards.

How long will it be, if it hasn't occurred already, before a student will come to their dean or department chairman and say, "You know, the version of course XYZ offered at the University of Illinois over the Net is much better and is taught by a superstar in the field, and I want to take that in place of this." We're already starting to see our best faculty sought after in kind of a Michael Jordan model of higher education, to franchise and deliver what they know and do and can speak about on massive scales for massive amounts of money. We're seeing higher production value creations that may provide more authentic and better learning than in the classroom form. And we also have the danger that universities will simply put television cameras into their classrooms and broadcast the traditional classroom and call that distance independent, or take correspondence courses and convert them to HTML and call that distance-independent learning.

To summarize the dangers - yesterday I showed you a matrix of same and different time and place. The heart of the university, as Dr. Everhart mentioned, started in a same-time / same-place community of scholars. That tradition has largely continued. We now have the possibility that the knowledge creating, using, disseminating activities of the university can be strongly augmented and reinforced in the other three variations of time and place. Some people are betting that the university could in fact vanish into cyberspace, and that its mission could be effectively carried out in the other quadrants with much less reliance on the fourth. I personally don't think that will be the case, but it's certainly an eventuality that universities need to pay attention to.