Please direct comments to Jess Brewer.
In the last decade, information technology (IT) has not only revolutionized the way humans communicate but also helped clarify the distinctions between information, knowledge and understanding. Inasmuch as the goals of the University include the illumination of these distinctions, the creation of new knowledge, the organization of information and the communication of understanding, it behooves us to use IT wisely in our work and to help guide its evolution. If we are careless or incompetent, the exponential growth of useless information may drown the spark of understanding, and commercial exploitation of educational IT may undermine the very raison d'etre of Universities and the face-to-face (F2F) educational experience. If we are ingenious and diligent, we can facilitate the distillation of raw information into useful knowledge, and IT may be used to eliminate much of the uninspiring drudgery of education, liberating resources for dramatically enhanced F2F interactions.
For our Department in particular, IT presents the following strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats:
Particularly dramatic growth is underway in the educational IT sector, mostly in what is called ``distance education''. The leading application software for course delivery over the Web is WebCT, developed at UBC and now used by nearly 150,000 faculty at over 1,500 colleges and universities in over 60 countries to deliver course materials to nearly 6 million students. We at UBC are entitled to free use of WebCT.
While distance education is a welcome innovation for people who, for one reason or another, cannot attend the University in person, it is a pale substitute for the real thing. Here at UBC, the advantages of tools like WebCT lie in their potential to relieve instructors' logistic burdens, improve communications with and between students, offer easier access to supplementary information or exercises, and thus free more class time for effective F2F instruction, which will probably always be superior for synergistic interaction and pedagogy.
The obvious threat is for shortsighted politicians to mistake economics for efficiency and imagine that the availability of a good WebCT course presentation could take the place of the faculty member who created it. Pressure might then be applied to University administrators to implement such replacements.
Using the Web, this store of information can be delivered to anyone who requests it, in formats at least as pleasing to the eye as the most expensive paper textbooks. There are also a wide variety of presentation tools (such as WebCT and the various Web browsers) that allow the server and the user to organize that information and optimize the efficiency of its retrieval.
Advances in hardware have greatly improved the delivery of information when the user already knows where to look for it; but with literally billions of Web pages now accessible, the problem of locating information becomes central. Commercial ``portal sites'', whose main purpose is to advertise clients' Web sites, simply add to the confusion.
Fortunately, many search engines have been developed to help people find the information they seek on the Web, with increasing success. Whereas the first such public services tended to deliver a huge number of links in arbitrary order, most of which pointed to sites with useless content, the latest engines employ ingenious algorithms to produce a link list in decreasing order of relevance or quality. They often succeed, but not always. Moreover, even the best sites are not necessarily appropriate to the purpose at hand. Most of the information on the Web is either pedagogically useless or just plain wrong.
There is therefore a growing need for custom databases containing information that is (a) presented efficiently and ergonomically; (b) appropriate to a specific use; and (c) certified as reliable by people who ought to know.
This was the rationale for the HyperTextBook project developed for the Science 1 program with support from TLEF and our Department. The HyperTextBook is both a collection of pedagogical material appropriate to First Year Science (Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology) and a Web-accessible database of links to and between the ``pages'' of that material. Its purpose and use are most easily explained by trying it out.
Our Department would like to take an increasingly active role in the development of such pedagogical and research tools using IT.
Today's research groups are frequently geographically dispersed, especially in megaproject-oriented fields. This has created an urgent need for efficient remote access to large, highly specialized databases. This need has been recognized for several decades; in fact, subatomic physics and astronomy have led the way to modern IT, the most dramatic example being the World Wide Web itself, which was invented at CERN.
A new trend has now appeared toward remote networking in smaller research groups. This has been made possible by the availability of inexpensive hardware and easy-to-use software for database creation, manipulation and delivery over the Web. For example, all the µSR data every taken at TRIUMF (over 80,000 ``runs'') can now be searched, displayed and analyzed using any Web browser from anywhere in the world.
Our Departmental Web Site at http://www.physics.ubc.ca/ is the main window through which the world sees our Department. Its maintenance and continuous improvement are essential to recruitment, public relations and communication. At the same time, we are developing tools for gathering information more efficiently, such as a ``Web Wizard'' site where administrators or lecturers can interactively create Web surveys, including the HTML form presented to their staff or students, the database in which responses are stored, and the PHP script which displays text and statistics from the results stored in the database.
As mentioned earlier, Physics & Astronomy currently employs two system administrators who are overloaded with the task of keeping Departmental systems operational and secure. Almost all IT projects are undertaken by faculty or students in their spare time. It might be worth considering the appointment of an Information Officer whose task would be to coordinate these enthusiastic volunteers and ensure that their contributions to the Department's Web presence are competent and fit together in a coherent whole.