Keynote Address by
William R. Brody, President
The Johns Hopkins University GREATER BALTIMORE COMMITTEE TECH NIGHT
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1997 / BALTIMORE CONVENTION CENTER Thank you, Dr. Forrest Tobey, for that demonstration. The Peabody Conservatory at the Johns Hopkins University is known internationally for the performance and composition of classical music, and for providing gifted artists with a musical education of the highest quality. Now, in the information age, the Peabody is combining its traditional strengths in music with science and entrepreneurial vision to become a market leader in music-related electronic and distance education, and related products. My thanks tonight to Dr. Geoff Wright, director of computer music and director of technology transfer at the Peabody. Geoff and Forrest are at work on many exciting new technologies at the Peabody like you've just seen demonstrated. We've mixed computers and music for 25 years at the Peabody, and are preparing to launch several commercial ventures in the near future. Geoff would be happy to talk to any of you about our work at the end of the evening. Thank you, Geoff. I would also like to thank Peabody Institute director Bob Sirota for helping with my crash course in musical conducting before coming here tonight. It truly is a pleasure to be here. I'm grateful to Tech Council Executive Director Jane Schaab for giving me this opportunity to speak, and to Dr. Howard Frank for that very kind introduction. When I became president of the Johns Hopkins University a year ago, I asked a committee of faculty to organize a symposium to consider the information revolution. Mario Marino, founder of Legent Corporation, one of the largest software companies in the world, delivered the keynote address. Something he said that afternoon has stayed with me ever since. He said, Not only will the unimaginable happen, it will happen faster than you can imagine. Change, he said, comes hardest to those with the deepest traditions. Imagine how you would feel hearing those words if you were the brand new president of a 121-year-old institution; sitting on stage in academic robes that are essentially the same as they were in 1500; and celebrating the fact that you are part of a tradition that stretches back, literally, almost 1,000 years. Change comes hardest to those with the deepest traditions. Let's accept that bit of wisdom. Let's also agree that change is upon us -- I think we all know this is so. The inevitable conclusion is that for many of us -- and not just university presidents -- there are going to be some challenging and difficult times ahead. I believe this is so. In fact, I see it every day. But change of this magnitude is not unprecedented. Two thousand, five hundred years ago, in Athens, Plato confronted the advent of a radical new technology: book publishing. In the dialogue Phaedrus, Plato warns about the dangers of book learning, which he says will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned that way, through lack of practice at using their memory. Relying on books instead of memory is dangerous, he warns, because books, in Plato's words, bring the appearance of wisdom instead of wisdom itself. Two thousand years later, in west-central Germany, the abbot of Sponheim published a book of his own, "De Laude Scriptorum." It is a book solely devoted to explaining why, in the words of the abbot, monks should not stop copying because of the invention of printing. The year is 1494, the printing press is less than 40 years old, and the role of the copyist is a burning issue. For hundreds of years, the monastic scriptorum had been the wellspring of learning. Printing threatened all that, and so the abbot wrote a book extolling the moral and educational value of hand-copying. Ironically, to get his message across, the abbot produced a large number of copies of his book using Gutenberg's printing press, the very invention he scorned. Luckily, the abbot was proved wrong, and in the West, the printed word flourished. Let us note that it was at just this time -- the early modern era -- when Western Civilization became ascendant. Coincidence? Hardly. As Peter Drucker points out in his book, "Post Capitalist Society," the West moved into leadership ahead of the ancient and venerable civilizations in China and Islam almost precisely at the same time it reorganized its schools around the new technology of the printed book. China and the Islamic world both used the printed book, but kept it out of their schools, preferring to stay with the tried and true methods of recitation and rote memorization. Information was controlled -- in this case, by the teachers -- and, as a result, learning and society stagnated. Now we jump forward another five hundred years, to the present era. In 1997, world production of microchips will reach 60 billion chips per year. Certain kinds of chips are so common, so easy to make, and so cheap, that in the computer industry they are known as "jelly beans." They are a mass-produced commodity costing only pennies apiece. Do these jelly beans portend great change in the future, in much the same way first the published books and later the first mass-printed books did? Some would say, "No." But I ask you to consider the fate of one company whose name is familiar to you all. Until ten years ago, there was probably not a greater, more respected brand name in the world than Encyclopedia Britannica. It meant reliability and truth. It was good for children. It had a long and glorious history, and it even sounded British. It was an easy sell, a product that defined the encyclopedia business, just as, in many ways, a Johns Hopkins defines the research university of today. How has the computer chip affected this titan of publishing? Since 1990, sales of Britannica's multi-volume sets have plummeted by more than 50 percent. That's right, sales are less than half what they were seven years ago. How many people in this room tonight could hope to keep their companies afloat in that situation? Ah, but how can this be? I hear you ask. Have parents stopped buying their children encyclopedias? Not at all. They're still spending $1,500 to $2,000. Only now they're buying their kids personal computers, that include, among other things, an encyclopedia on CD-ROM in the package. But guess what? It's not Encyclopedia Britannica on that CD-ROM -- although it could have been. The executives at Encyclopedia Britannica failed to appreciate the tremendous magnitude of change that jelly beans represent. That company is now struggling through a very difficult reorganization. New technology demands new responses. When Plato considered the book, he realized it meant, ultimately, the demise of the academy as he knew it. I emphasize those words: "as he knew it." For the academic enterprise did not end, nor will it end now. But it will change. The advent of the mass-produced book in 1500 did not end the schools then in existence. Just the opposite: In Western society, where the new technology was embraced, the new educational institutions mushroomed. Modern universities owe their growth, their importance and their phenomenal staying power to their willingness to embrace this new technology, and to grow and develop with it. Of the 85 institutions worldwide that have been in continuous operation since the year 1520 -- including institutions like the Catholic Church and the English Parliament -- fully 70 of them are universities. But now we are confronted with a new educational paradigm, one that is not yet fully explored or understood. Many people underestimate the real meaning of this new technology of computers, the Internet and jelly beans. They believe that, in the future, everything done in schools today using black boards and chalk, pen and paper, will still be done, only on computers instead. Computers, they think, are the electronic blackboards of the future. They could not be more mistaken. We are faced with something new and profoundly different. In the next several decades, we will need to use this new information technology to advance the science of education itself; to make learning more efficient, more effective, more universal and more easily available. To do this, we will need to create entirely new paradigms of learning. The virtual conductor I demonstrated earlier this evening represents a step in this direction. It is a rich interface between man and computer that allows teaching, discovery and creation to occur all at the same time. This three-way confluence of discovery, learning and creation lies at the heart of the new educational paradigm. Increasingly, computer-assisted education will be facilitated by simulation that will permit elaborate expression and interaction between man and machine. Surgeons, for instance, might be trained using virtual reality simulations. At the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Chief Radiologist Elias Zerhouni and associates have developed new ways of using magnetic resonance and state-of-the-art computer imaging to create full three-dimensional pictures of the head, skull and brain. This technology has been used to create a live, 3-D picture of a beating human heart, and can take a fantastic journey inside a breathing lung. Imagine the possible applications of this tremendous new teaching and research tool. The teaching and learning power of tools such as these is immense -- and untapped. At our School of Engineering, chemical engineering professor Mike Karweit has used computers to eliminate the cost and difficulty of introductory lab work. He has created a virtual laboratory for engineering students. By solving real-world problems taken from the mechanical, chemical, electrical and civil engineering disciplines, students progress at their own pace, and learn by doing, two hallmarks of the new paradigm of learning. The world is changing in ways both fundamental, and, from our perspective, almost incomprehensible. The essence of the information revolution was summed up by Gordon Moore, the former president and CEO of Intel, who observed that computer technology was halving in price or doubling in power every eighteen months. Today, his rule of thumb is known as Moore's law. He made the connection that the downward spiral of cost for computing power was an essential characteristic of the industry, and part of its phenomenal growth. The impact of these changes goes far beyond the personal computer. According to the World Bank, in 1930 the cost of a three-minute trans-Atlantic call was around $250. Today, it is literally almost pennies. Perhaps some of you have seen stories in the papers about the experiment in Italy -- which is proving hugely popular -- in which one company is giving away free phone service in exchange for listening to a commercial every time you pick up the phone. Meanwhile, MCI predicts the total volume of voice traffic on global phone systems will be superseded by the total volume of data traffic in three years' time. Information was once scarce and expensive. Many institutions, from cities to universities, were organized based on this premise. People were easier to transport than information, so the people came together to form communities based around certain kinds of information. Today, according to Moore's law, information is becoming ever more free and ubiquitous. But at the same time, the control and effective interpretation of information is becoming increasingly valuable. That's why TV Guide made greater profits last year than the three major networks combined. And that's why an institution like Johns Hopkins will have an active and vital role in the upside down economy of the new millennium. Our mission of research -- central to our culture and identity -- will provide new avenues of growth and development in the years ahead. Our Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel has designed and built a number of unmanned scientific satellites for the purposes of pure research. Perhaps you saw the stunning pictures from NEAR -- the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft -- as it swept by asteroid Mathilde on June 27. This is just a precursor of the planned year-long orbit and mapping of the asteroid Eros in 1999. In August, the Kennedy Space Center achieved a near-perfect launch of our latest scientific satellite: ACE, the Advanced Composition Explorer. It will study the sun and serve as the world's first lookout for geomagnetic solar storms from its orbit 1 million miles above the earth. But we are not only looking skyward. Associate professor of Mechanical Engineering Gregory Chirikjian is at work on a whole new breed of articulating robots that can come apart and reassemble themselves in thousands of configurations to explore, build and retrieve in environments unfriendly to humankind. The field of medical genetics and biomedical engineering promises new discoveries that will control and cure many common diseases. Recently, scientists at Johns Hopkins introduced a new tool in this quest. They devised a method of attaching microscopic magnetic beads to individual strands of DNA, enabling researchers to literally pull apart the building block of life, one strand at a time. Elsewhere, vice provost for research Ted Poehler and his associates have invented the Holy Grail of power storage -- the first all-plastic battery. Batteries of today are heavy, full of toxic metals and dangerous. But the plastic battery, when commercially developed, promises to be lighter and ecologically friendly. It could be molded and formed into almost any shape or size. It's a new discovery which promises to keep on going and going and going.... These are just some of the many exciting projects we're engaged in right now. And the future looks even more exciting. As information proliferates, universities will lose the monopoly they once enjoyed in advanced education. This presents us with a tremendous opportunity. Increasingly, universities such as Johns Hopkins will partner with other information sources, and other research endeavors for the delivery of educational services. In the mid-Atlantic region, centered in Baltimore, we have a tremendous wealth of colleges and universities, of software designers and programmers, of telecommunications providers and marketers. This confluence of expertise in overlapping areas represents the critical mass we need to lead the nation -- and the world -- in developing the educational technologies of the next century. Working together, sharing resources and ideas and enthusiasm, I believe we can create the new Silicon Valley -- call it Education Alley -- that will apply these new technologies to teaching the world. As we move from the Information Age to the Knowledge Age, there can be no greater, more important, or more rewarding task. The future is there, waiting for us to take hold and shape it. We are a city full of technologists and dreamers and can-do entrepreneurs. Tonight, I can say unequivocally that we at the Johns Hopkins Institutions are anxious to do our part. Let's work together. Let's invent the future of learning and education. It's a creation that, like Johns Hopkins, will keep going, and going, and going.
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