Richard G. Bribiescas, a teaching fellow for the 500-student Science B-29: "Human Behavior Biology," said he created the class' web site out of some of the traditional frustrations of teaching a large class.

"It seemed to me we gave out reams and reams of paper in the form of syllabi, problem sets and other handouts and as soon as we passed out 500-plus sheets of paper, students would ask for more because they had lost them or weren't in lecture," Bribiescas wrote in an e-mail.

Hokoda says he took the "paperless class" idea to a new level for his GSD 2307: "Advanced Digital Image Processing" course. No paper whatsoever was exchanged for the class, including assignments. Students' final projects for the class are available online in the GSD web site and Hokoda plans to give students CD-ROMs of the entire course site over the summer.

Even sites that begin as administrative labor-savers tend to evolve into specialized academic tools for the course being taught. Bribiescas says the Science B-29 web site included an innovative way to prepare for tests. Old tests were uploaded to web pages and students could take mock tests by clicking on answers on the page, providing them with instant feedback on whether or not they chose correctly.

The Electronic Library

Rudenstine said in his Commencement address that he envisions the Internet becoming the electronic equivalent of an extremely large reference library with the electronic equivalent of thousands of reference librarians. For many professors, the research applications of the Internet are already apparent.

Lecturer on History Thomas J. Brown says his web site for History 1607: "The Old South" has received national attention for the way it makes vast amounts of census and other data available to students.

A search program at the History 1607 site allows students to select a census year from which they want information. They then enter what statistics they want, for example, the number of slaves in a given county in Virginia in 1840. Armed with this kind of detailed, and often complex, statistical knowledge, students were able to become experts on a given county, matching up the subjective impressions they received from the reading with the quantitative information they gained from the web site, Brown says.

Links to other sites provided students with access to the nearly 3,000 original slave narratives that are published on-line, allowing them to search the texts for key words or phrases for subjects they were researching for papers, he says.

"People were very enthusiastic about it," Brown says.

The inspiration behind many of these innovations may have come from the professors, but the computer skills necessary to put them into practice most often have come from information technology departments set up by the schools to facilitate such new ideas.

FAS' Instructional Computing Group (ICG) is typical of the usual sort of arrangement throughout Harvard. Rather than working from the top down to increase the use of information technology in the classroom, the ICG is designed to facilitate the efforts of professors who want to try new approaches to teaching.

"The idea is to provide mechanisms whereby people in the departments can become proficient and make their own decisions," Martin says.

The ICG was extremely helpful in putting together the History 1607 web page, Brown says.

"I called up and had some ideas, and they had some of theirs," Brown says. "Some of mine were completely unfeasible and they came up with things I never dreamed were possible."