During are excerpts from President Bok's Annual part to the Board of Overseers for 1983-84, released today, on computers and education:

During the past year, universities have begun to attract at new kind of publicity. The most arresting stories to appear in our newspapers have not featured students or professors or even new curricula. They have focused on machines:

Hewlett-Packard Gives Five Million Dollar Dollar Grant for Computer Equipment to Harvard Medical School.

Digital Plans $45 Million Education Project

A Personal Computer for Every Freshman: Even Faculty Skeptics Are Now Enthusiast

All across the country, headlines like these have signaled the sudden rush of a new technology that promises to leave a lasting imprint on the practice of education at Harvard and other universities.

Technology is already starting to affect the was in which students prepare for classes in several of our professional schools. Last fall, the Business School began requiring every entering student to purchase and IBM personal computer. Those who were unfamiliar with these machines received special instruction in their use Software was distributed to enable students to manipulate financial data. Word processing programs were provided to assist students in preparing their reports. Because of the formidable powers of the personal computer, teachers could assign more complicated problems than before, problems that more closely resembled situations confronting corporate executives in real life.

The Law School has not yet required students to buy computers. But students and professors have formed an alliance to develop programs to help in mastering basic material such as the rules of accounting tax, property, and evidence. Although these exercise are optional, over half the class has used them in some large courses. A more venturesome creation permits students to watch a mock trail on a screen and objects at any point to the questions asked of witnesses. With each objection, a computer asks students to choose the ground for intervening from a list of possible reasons. If the student answers correctly, the computer so states and the trial resumes. If the student gives the wrong answer--or if there is no proper ground for protest-the computer so indicates and explains why the student erred. At the end of the tape, the program automatically flashes back to every point in the testimony at which the student failed to make a valid objection.

In the Medical School, computer programs have been developed to simulate patients with a variety of diseases. With these programs, students can ask the "patient" questions or order medical tests, and plausible answers or test will results will instantly appear on the screen. By framing hypotheses and testing them in this fashion, students can eventually make a diagnosis and either have it confirmed or ask the computer where their reasoning went astray.

More conventional video technology is already in wide use to carry instruction to students at separate geographical locations. At Harvard, the Medical School is connected by closed-circuit TV to our teaching hospitals, to the Science Center in Cambridge, to MIT and even to other, more distant institutions via satellite. Through these links, speeches and seminars at any of these institutions can be viewed by faculty and students in all the others. Elsewhere, universities have launched even more ambitious ventures. Stanford offers engineering courses by closed-circuit TV so that employees in high-tech companies throughout Silicon Valley can attend class without leaving their place of work. The University of Washington gives televised courses to supplement the education of medical students in places as distant as Alaska, Idaho and Montana.

Technology also offers, ways of improving communication outside of class among people in different locations. By linking personal computers to one another, a university can enable students to send messages back and forth and ask questions of instructors or campus officials. In this way, students can seek help from many classmates simultaneously and communicate with their professors.

Libraries provide another fertile place for technological innovation. By next July, almost all of our new acquisitions will be registered in a computer so that librarians can instantly learn the whereabouts of a recent book or periodical, not only in our own collections but in any of a number of cooperating institutions. Medical students will soon be able to use their personal computers to search for articles in a number of journals and instantly reproduce the entire text. It is not yet possible to do the same for all books and articles in a library, since most of these materials do not exist in machine-readable form. In the not--too-distant future, however, computers may be able to conjure up on a screen the titles, table of contents, and indexes not only of all books in a university library but of all volumes in all participating libraries across the country and abroad.

Prospects for the New Technology

In theory, at least, the new technology has the power to transform the nature of the university. Much routine advising could shift to a network of personal computers linked to a common data base so that students could instantly have the answers to a host of factual questions, about course requirements, employment interviews, campus events, and homework assignments. In time, lectures could move from classrooms to television screens so that students could listen to a professor and immediately test their comprehension of the material by working through a series of questions and problems presented by an appropriate computer program. Science concentrators could simulate many laboratory experiments on computers without leaving their residence hall. Video technology could not only transmit lectures but bring the resources of the outside world to students in living color. For example, are history majors could use a videodisc linked with a computer to explore the great museums they chose for as long as they wished, and summon up text to explain the picture and the circumstances under which it was painted.

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