Experience should also make us wary of dramatic claims for the impact of the new technology. Thomas Edison was clearly wrong in declaring that the phonograph would revolutionize education. Radio could nor make a lasting impact on the public schools even though foundations gave generous subsidies to bring programs into the classroom. Television met a similar fate of glowing predictions heralding its powers to improve learning.

In each instance, technology failed to live up to its early promise for three reasons: resistance by teachers, high cost, and the absence of demonstrable gains in student achievement. There is as yet no clear evidence that computers and videodiscs will meet a happier fate. Faculty members may be as reluctant to give way to computers as they were in the case of radios and television sets. The cost of the equipment likewise remains quite formidable. According to one professor, to provide all of the 460,000 engineering students in America with a modern computer workstation joined by a network and linked to a central database would cost ten billion dollars. True, hardware cost have been declining at a compound rate of 25 percent for a number of years. But hardware makes up only a small fraction of the total cost of computer assisted education; the major expense lies in preparing suitable materials and maintaining the software and the machines. Thus, the overall costs of the new technology seem likely to remain high for the foreseeable future.

Finally, the educational benefits of technology also remain in dispute. There is still little proof that new devices yield lasting improvements in learning. Many studies purport to find such gains. But most of them can be explained on the grounds that students using computers were temporarily motivated by the sheer novelty of the machines or that more effort and better teaching went into the computerized courses than were devoted to the conventional classes with which they were compared. Thus, the learning improvements that early investigators reported form computer-assisted instruction shrank to nothing when the same teacher taught both the experimental and the conventional classes with comparable amounts of preparation. Similarly, the gains achieved in computer experiments lasting less than four weeks dropped by more than two-thirds when the experiments continued beyond eight weeks and the novelty of the new technology began to wear off.

Undaunted by these obstacles, educators and high tech companies are spending huge sums to prove the skeptics wrong Control Data Corporation reputedly invested almost a billion dollars in the computerized college curriculum, PLATO. With assistance from major companies, Brown, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, and other institutions are each spending tens of millions of dollars in equipment and programming to "wire" their campuses. Against the backdrop of these developments. Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Science has launched a comprehensive review of how technology might be best put to use for research, administrative, and not, least educational purposes. It is high time that we studied these questions, for the computer revolution is already upon us. What impact might these machines have on the nature and effectiveness of education? What kinds of innovation are feasible and not prohibitively expensive? What advantages and disadvantages could technology bring to the quality of life in the University?

Machines that Eliminate Drudgery

Many widely used technological innovations seem principally designed to save time or eliminate drudgery and routine. Electronic bulletin boards spare students the burden of finding announcement in campus newspapers or dropping by departmental offices. On-line catalogues save a trip to the library reading room. Word processing avoids the trouble of typing new drafts, while remote-site TV can take away the need to travel from home to campus.

As these conveniences accumulate, one begins to wonder whether machines will eventually permit students to learn at home instead of going to the expense of living and attending courses on a university campus. If so, technology will not merely eliminate drudgery; it will save substantial sums by removing the need dormitories, classrooms, and other costly facilities. The possibility is not entirely fanciful. After all, the Open University in Great Britain is enrolling 100,000 students in televised courses, and that achievement has come about without much use of microcomputers, videodiscs, and other newer devices that promise to expand the variety and challenge of instruction.

Despite the success of the Open University, the likelihood of depopulating our campuses through televised instruction seems remote. Residential universities offer compelling advantages. For many students, the opportunity for personal contact with faculty members is very important; think of the number of prominent graduates who point to a relationship or even a single encounter with a professor as a critical event in their college years. For most people, learning is also in part a group experience in which each student gains reinforcement from others. Thus, providers of televised learning, including the Open University, have found it necessary to offer tutorials, advising, periods of residency and other devices that give more structure and human contact in contact order to sustain motivation. In addition living with other young people and participating in extracurricular activities not only give pleasure, they contribute much to students' learning and to their tolerance for other points of view, their sense of responsibility, their social and emotional maturity. Apart from these benefits, the years spent living in a university afford to many people an enjoyable experience they would not willingly give up even to save a few thousand dollars a year in room and board. For all these reasons, the residential campus promises to remain a fixture despite its costs.

If the emancipating powers of technology will not do away with the residential university, will they lead to improvements in learning that go beyond mere convenience? It all depends on how students use the time technology saves them. In many cases, however, educational benefits will unquestionably occur. For example, the personal computer has not only enabled our Business School students to avoid drudgery; it has allowed them to grapple with more complicated, realistic problems, using linear programming and other sophisticated analytic techniques not previously reasible for ordinary homework assignments. In the Design School, computer-generated maps and models reduce the time and skill required to complete a drawing so that students can experiment with many more ways of solving landscape planning problems. In the College, word processing en experimental sections of Expository Writing has not merely spared students the drudgery of typing over papers; teachers can now students to revise and rewrite until they submit a more polished piece of work than would have been possible without the new machines. In all these case, time previously spent doing dull, repetitive tasks can now be devoted to thinking about much challenging, important questions.

Objections to the New Technology

Apart from the excitement of the new machines, what is it, exactly, that they can do to improve the process of learning? What effects will they have on the campus environment?

The first point to remember is that many important tasks remain beyond the reach of the new technology. With all its powers, the computer cannot, contribute much to the learning of open-ended subjects like moral philosophy, religion, historical interpretation, literary criticism, or social theory--fields of knowledge that cannot be reduced to formal rules and procedures. Since such subjects are among the most important in the curriculum, this limitation is hardly trivial. Computers are also incapable of inspiring students or serving as role models. They cannot conduct a genuine dialogue because they cannot comprehend analogies or metaphors or even understand conversation beyond the five-year-old level. Finally, machines can rarely tell why a student is experiencing difficulty in learning and understanding (although computers can test students and keep detailed record of their mistakes in order to help the teacher detect learning problems).

Whereas these limitations are important, they still leave ample room for applying technology to learning, especially in the major professional schools, in science departments, in engineering programs, and in many areas of social science. Other criticisms of technology, however, are more sweeping. They warn that computers may harm the entire educational process by gradually eroding some of the intangible, more humane values of university life.

A familiar concern of this kind is that computers may erect barriers that will isolate students and divide teachers from learners. If students have to spend more time with their new machines, they may become more solitary and avoid the human contact that does so much to enrich the university experience. If it really takes 100 or 200 hours to prepare a good program suitable for an hour's instruction, professors may withdraw to develop software leaving students to work alone at their consoles. There is also a risk of overlooking subtler benefits that come from older, less "efficient" methods of education. Lectures may be passive, but as the early devotees of self-paced instruction soon discovered, they can have an inspirational value, not replicable by machines, in showing what it means to be truly in command of an important subject. Answering students questions via computer may be more efficient, but posing a routine question to an advisor is often the way by which a shy student reaches out for help in dealing with homesickness, insecurity, and other problems to which no electronic device can possible respond.

Effects on Learning