In October 1972, almost 40 years ago,
Brown University's Ad Hoc Committee on Continuing Education issued a report. I first saw this document within a week or two of starting in alumni relations at Brown in early 1989. The Report was included in a 1988 update by yet another committee, whose work included looking forward and prognosticating about the future of alumni lifelong learning and the role of the alumni association.
I do like to address the future of alumni relations, but "futurism" is fraught with flaws and risks. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see what a blue ribbon committee thought about the future of alumni education, first from the viewpoint of 1972, and then from 1988.
The 1972 report exhorted the institution to invite its faculty members "to invent, devise and create new means of motivating and guiding alumni into better use of books, records, film, television and other other instruments of learning which surround us in such abundance." This multimedia approach included an outline of how videocassettes, still the realm of institutional use might soon enter the "consumer market" and be accessible to individuals. Sears Roebuck, they wrote, would soon start selling videocassette recording and playback units to consumers for just $1,600. Each.
Another technology recommended for bringing the campus educational experience to alumni in their homes was "CATV" – known to the next generation as Cable TV. And the committee urged the university to bind "sound sheets" into the alumni monthly, so that alumni could play audio of faculty lectures on their record players at home. The committee stated that "institutions like Brown must cast off the strait jacket of established formats and take advantage of these technologies."
Now fast forward your VCR to 1988.
At the dawn of the Internet era a new set of technologies was on the horizon. Rather than anticipating the ability to watch a videotape for $1,600, the second committee was pondering how to use the power of computer networks to connect far-flung alumni to campus via personal PC. In a section titled Dialing Brown via the computer, the report's authors invoked "the Communications Desktop," a combination of technologies then "in the planning stage." The concepts they described 21 years ago reflect several technologies we currently use to obtain information remotely – and we use many of them to keep our alumni connected to us and to each other.
For example:
1988 Prediction: "Alumni nationally and throughout the world would be able to subscribe to materials provided by the "Communications Desktop," no matter how specific." When? "The best guess: 1993."
2009 Reality: Correct. RSS provides this ability now, although listserv and USENET newsgroups provided similar functionality at the time of the '88 report.
1988 Prediction: "[By 1998], video will be sent across networks as quickly as a computer copies a file today."
2009 Reality: Correct. Streaming video hit the web in 1998, just as predicted ten years earlier by Brown's "information experts." That year, 284.6 million video streams crisscrossed the Internet.
1988 Prediction: University library systems "will be electronically accessible in the future for those alumni seeking all manner of reference material..." But "economics, not technology, stand in the way of sharing with Brown's extended family the vast resources of a great university."
2009 Reality: Correct. They nailed that one, especially the economics part. Sure, tremendous amounts of free material are online, but expensive journals and databases remain off-limits to off-campus users because of Byzantine licensing policies. But open access publishing has begun to change that and an online academic information revolution lies just ahead.
The Communication Desktop as imagined by Brown's 1988 Alumni Education group [click to enlarge]:
Finally, the committee described a scenario, likely to become a reality "by the time the next continuing education report is written." Given the 16 year interval since the previous report, the 1988 group probably expected the following scenario to take place circa 2004.
- An alumna in Houston logs in and searches the Brown University library and the national library for documents she needs for her job as an Exxon scientist. "The search takes a minute and appears on her computer at home."
- She downloads a topographic map and has it printed in a field office.
- Then she switches to her personal account and looks at the student newspaper, the alumni magazine, and a campus news periodical online.
- Noticing an article about one of her professors, she sends him an email and a family photo.
- She sees a listing for a talk that is being delivered on campus that night – 1,800 miles away. She requests "to have the videotape downloaded onto her machine within 24 hours after it is given."
The only thing the committee really missed was the advent of live digital video, superseding magnetic tape or other physical media that would require conversion to electronic formats. Information subscriptions, online news, remote print on demand, library access, and media sharing – the 1988 group hit several big nails on the head.
While it's fun to review our predecessors' predictions,
what about the view from 2009? Rather than make predictions of my own, I'm going to do as the 1988 committee did, and quote MIT professor
Marvin Minsky:
You have to form the habit of not wanting to be right for very long. If I still believe something after five years, I doubt it.... Anything you hear about computers should be ignored. We are in the Dark Ages.... You can read what your contemporaries think, but you should remember they are ignorant savages.
And that includes me (and you)...so no predictions from this savage, not this time around anyway. But if you have a prediction, please do leave a comment.
