The essential technical prerequisite here is high speed Internet access for all students, faculty, and staff. There is simply no acceptable excuse for not connecting all faculty and staff offices and laboratories to LANs on the High Speed Network, and this should be completed immediately. Universal Internet access for students is an urgent priority, but will require some stopgap solutions until the large and long overdue job of wiring dormitory rooms and connecting all dormitories to the high speed network is complete. While dormitories remain unwired, we can set up servers and SLIP software with plenty of 28.8 bps modems, plus faster access from labs around campus. We could give away 28.8 modem to certain students in exchange for them being ``on call'' to help other students with technology problems. Or we could contract with a large Internet provider to do this for us. (This may be the most practical solution in the short term.) For either solution, we may need to add ordinary phone lines to dorm rooms. An Internet provider could also service off-campus students and faculty working from home.
Universal access to the Internet will give a host of benefits and new opportunities:
We could achieve some of these objectives by buying a system such a Lotus Notes instead of depending only on the Internet, but this would probably be much more expensive and more difficult to support. Hence we recommend that Georgetown rapidly leverage the World Wide Web as our communications model of choice. Whenever possible, we should avoid local software solutions, however superficially attractive, that make connections with the rest of the world awkward or worse, and hence negate much of the promise of the global electronic community. This is one crucial reason why academics must be meaningfully involved in all decisions about information technology: unlike non-academic administrators and business managers, faculty and research staff have a primary interest and an enormous stake in the quality of our digital connections to the rest of the world.
World Wide Web HomePage access for all faculty, staff, and students will provide an extremely cost-effective way to distribute and access information, and will allow students, faculty, and staff an easy way to capture and customize output (e.g., instruction notes, illustrations, etc.). We already have a number of WWW servers at Georgetown (Academic Computing Center, Office of the Medical Center Dean of Research & Graduate Education, Department of Physics, ...). The World Wide Web has rapidly become a central and pervasive component of the global information environment, and Georgetown should move rapidly to share, promote, and use this resource.
We should avoid using one of the specialized providers such as CompuServe or America Online. These services would not allow us to make use of inexpensive generic Internet tools, and may not be desirable for the whole University community. They force a specialized interface on us and may not provide all needed connectivity. It would be highly desirable if an Internet provider could help with overseas connections, since many students and faculty spend considerable amounts of time abroad.
To summarize and complete our vision for total connectivity, we emphasize that this should include: