Information technology must play a greatly expanded role at Georgetown if the University is to realize its goals for its students and faculty. Already, prospective students assess Georgetown from high schools and colleges with computing facilities far superior to ours, prospective faculty members express concern about our network and computing environment, and Georgetown faculty members in many disciplines risk falling behind their colleagues elsewhere in both research and teaching because they lack now-standard tools, such as desktop access to the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Our vision for computing and information systems at Georgetown must encompass the learning process, the connectivity of the university community, the support structure underlying the integration of technology, and the relationship of the university to the surrounding world.
Other leading universities are already well along the way toward excellence in the following four areas, and time is short for Georgetown to catch up.
The university must embrace new learning tools that challenge the traditional model of teacher, students, and classroom lectures. We need a variety of classrooms enabling new teaching and learning techniques, including classrooms with numerous stationary computers connected in a network, and classrooms where students can bring computers and connect to the network. While some aspects of campus-wide information technology are amenable to, or even require global solutions (e.g., network standards), the diversity of Georgetown's academic culture precludes campus-wide standards for educational computing. The differing needs of disciplines and sub-disciplines require differing approaches in the area of digital technology, just as they do in areas such as conventional teaching materials, faculty course loads, and reward structures. Plans for providing and integrating information technology should follow the flexible and nuanced patterns that the university has traditionally used with great success.
All faculty, students, and administrators must have access to the resources of the network from their offices, laboratories, classrooms, dormitory rooms, and off-campus residences. Total connectivity will greatly expand the possibilities for interactions among students, faculty, administrators, and alumni and alumnae. Learning will become more cooperative, and barriers between students and professors will be lowered. Software that supports the work of groups will become a key element in the learning process.
Information technology is reshaping the academic sphere in many ways; some of these are discussed in other subgroup reports, and others are treated in more detail below. Our challenge is to deploy and then to integrate these developments at Georgetown, in the context of diversity. This requires support staff for both technical operations and instructional innovations, and will be facilitated by effective use of video and computer-mediated training materials.
Georgetown's reputation increasingly depends on its presence in cyberspace. The global information superhighway makes possible electronic interactions that range from the traditional (e.g., remote access to library catalogs) to the novel (e.g., team projects that span continents and cultures). The ability to ``live'' in cyberspace has become a critical skill that our students, faculty, and administrators must develop.