The question is no longer whether; the question is how ?

Will the revolution be interactively televised? Displayed on PowerPoint? The World Wide Web? Claim students as its victims, or exalt them as its victors? Will it gut the university?

VisioN 2010 is a discussion dedicated to answering these questions. We aim not to predict the future, but to anticipate and explore which futures seem plausible. All of this with the belief that universities--faculty, students, staff, administrators--must be active rather than reactive in marching into the digital revolution. We are less interested in what the university's future may be than in what all of us would like it to be.

Toward that end, we have since 1994 done the following (note that this is the executive summary--a more detailed project history is also avaiable):

• secured funding from the Carnegie Foundation to initiate a project that would "stimulate discussions that address the revolutionary rather than the evolutionary implications of the digitization of information, especially for education and scholarly communication" (quoted from the original VisioN 2010 mission statement);
• formed a steering committee of members from the Commission on Preservation and Access and the University of Michigan School of Information;
• convened a September 1994 meeting with presidents from American Association of Universities institutions and computer industry leaders to brainstorm pertinent issues and narrow the VisioN 2010 focus;
• brought in consultant Jay Ogilvy of Global Business Network (GBN) to assist us in creating scenarios of the future that would serve us as planning tools and focus our discussion;
• convened a day-and-a-half January 1995 New Orleans seminar of scholars, technology leaders, and university administrators to create an initial set of scenarios for the future of higher education;
• convened a second day-and-a-half Chicago seminar in May of 1995 to critique and extend these scenarios and to work out some of their implications;
• brought in a professional writer, Frank DeSanto, to take these scenario drafts and to rewrite them as narrative and compelling scenario stories;
• asked Richard Lanham, a professor emeritus of English at UCLA and an active participant at all VisioN 2010 meetings, to write a commentary to travel with the revisions of the scenarios;
• conevened a September 1995 meeting with a group of provosts from American Association of Universities institutions to evaluate the scenarios and to develop strategies for assisting individual uninversities with the planning process;
• created this Web site to disseminate the work done thus far, to expand the scope and depth of the discussion, and to identify what further actions the VisioN 2010 project should undertake to help universities with their planning.

We ask for your input on the most fruitful directions the Vision 2010 project can take in its next stage. Which products and endeavors would be most helpful with information technology planning at your institution? Please post your thoughts and comments to our forum on the role of VisioN 2010, or send them via e-mail to vision-2010@umich.edu.
If you find this site useful--especially if you come back often--we'd like to know. Please take a moment to sign your name to the list of VisioN 2010 participants.

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