A teacher speaks; students listen and respond. The teacher has access to some corpus of knowledge, beliefs, and practices, and makes this corpus available to the students. Schools, colleges, and universities are spaces that exist primarily to bring students and teachers together so that this sharing of a corpus can take place.
The underlying diagram of a school appears in its simplest and most beautiful form when disciples gather within earshot of a guru in a place made by the shade of a bo tree. 18 The less sedentary Socrates strolled in a grove, with his disciples keeping pace. The little red schoolhouse-appropriate to colder climatesputs the students in a box with the teacher in front. Jeremy Bentham's proposed "Chrestomathic" monitorial school-a variant on the panopticon-had a single master in the middle surrounded by a circle of six monitors to keep order, then circular tiers with seats for nine hundred boys. 19
Modern schools, colleges, and universities have greater spatial differentiation and far more complex plans. They provide multiple classrooms to allow different sorts of instruction to proceed simultaneously; they add libraries, laboratories, art and design studios, music practice rooms, and other specialized facilities; and they link the pieces together with long cloisters or passageways (MIT's "infinite corridor" is emblematic). Residential institutions-like that planned by Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia-integrate rooms for scholars and provide hierarchies of informal and formal meeting places, so that the plan reads as an illustration of the dedicated scholarly life. The demand that colleges and universities typically make is to be "in residence"-to be part of the spatially defined community. And these communities enforce, as well, strict compliance with academic timetables, classroom schedules, and calendars.
Of course there have always been alternatives to making such permanent, rigidly organized places of learning. Preindustrial societies had their itinerant teachers and holy men who spread the word wherever they could find audiences. By providing printed books and efficient mail service, the Industrial Revolution made correspondence schools possible. Two-way radio allowed a teacher in Alice Springs to instruct children living on remote cattle stations scattered across the great Australian outback. In the era of the Wilson government, broadcast television and videotapes (in conjunction with reasonably good, old-fashioned mail service) created the possibility of Britain's Open University. Today digital telecommunication is producing a powerful resurgence of this alternative tradition; being online may soon become a more important mark of community membership than being in residence. (When the Aga Khan gave MIT's commencement address in 1994, he was not given the traditional honorary degree to make him symbolically part of the community, but rather a modem-equipped laptop computer and an MIT e-mail address.)
As the digital telecommunications era dawned, some universities were very quick to begin exploring the potential role of campus networks. At Dartmouth in the 1960s-way back in the era of time-sharing mainframes-a network of interactive terminals was put in place and heavily used. 20 At MIT in the 1980s, with extensive support from IBM and Digital, the campus-wide Athena system pioneered the educational use of networked workstations with (by the standards of the time) high-bandwidth interconnections. 21 By the 1990s campus networks were commonplace; even the ivy-clad dorms in Harvard Yard had been hooked up.
At the same time (beginning in the 1970s), ARPANET, BITNET, and ultimately the Internet began to shake up the traditional, insular structures of colleges and universities by creating quick, convenient, inexpensive channels for worldwide, campus-to-campus interchange of text and data. These long-distance links were hooked up to local networks, such as MIT's Athena, which disseminated access around the campuses themselves. Scholars quickly found that electronic contact with distant correspondents could sometimes be more rewarding than conversation with colleagues from just down the hall. Online conferences and bulletin boards began to challenge departmental common rooms and local hangouts as the best places to pick up the latest on specialized topics. By the 1990s many academics found that they simultaneously inhabited local scholarly communities, which provided their offices and paid their salaries, and virtual communities, which supplied much of their intellectual nourishment and made increasing demands on their time and loyalties. The tension was beginning to show.
Network connections quickly create new ways of sharing knowledge and enacting practices and so force changes in the characters of teaching spaces. At the very least, a lecture theater now needs a computer workstation integrated with the podium and a computer-connected video projector to supplement the old blackboards and slide projectors; the podium is no longer a place for reading from a book or lecturing from written notes, but a spot for directing and interpreting a stream of bits. And instead of taking notes on paper, students use their laptop computers to capture and annotate these bits.
Seminar rooms change too. They now need to be set up for videoconferencing as well as for face-to-face discussions. 22 But that is just the beginning. Desktop-to-desktop, switched video networks open the more radical possibility of teaching in virtual rather than traditional physical settings. Students might have office conferences with faculty members without leaving their dormitory rooms. Seminars might be conducted without seminar rooms. Symposia might virtually assemble speakers from widely scattered locations. Lecturers might perform from distant places, and without the need to concentrate students in auditoriums.
School and university libraries become less like document warehouses and dispensaries and more like online information-brokering services. Reserve desks are supplanted by online document collections, and slide libraries by huge image and video-on-demand servers. Centralized reading rooms fragment into scattered information access points; any place where a student or faculty member may want to sit and work-an auditorium seat, library carrel, desk, dorm room, or officeneeds a laptop hookup point.
Even laboratories can sometimes be broken up and scattered-and benefit from it. 23 The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, for example, has developed an astronomical system called MicroObservatory. The master units of this system are networked computers in school classrooms. These are used to control motorized, digital-imaging telescopes mounted on rooftops and to view the telescope images remotely. Image-processing software is used to subtract out the sky so that observations can be made in the daytime. An extended version of this system might incorporate hundreds of telescopes scattered around the world and allow students to make observations from anywhere there is a network connection.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, the idea of a virtual campus -paralleling or perhaps replacing the physical one-seems increasingly plausible. 24 If a latter-day Jefferson were to lay out an ideal educational community for the third millennium, she might site it in cyberspace.