New Technologies for Access: An Interview with Vijay Kumar

Vijay Kumar

Dr. Vijay Kumar is Assistant Provost and Director of Academic Computing at MIT, and is working on the interface between technology and education. He is also a member of the Applications Strategy Council for Internet2 and Principal Investigator of the Open Knowledge Initiative. Here he shares with Library Connect readers his thoughts on what new initiatives and technologies are in the pipeline to help students, teachers, researchers and others take advantage of digital resources.

LC: In a very general sense, how easy will it be for people in future to have access to digital resources?

Vijay Kumar: All dimensions, from production and delivery to access, suggest a world where it will be increasingly easy to access digital resources. On the supply side, more assets and resources are being digitized, meaning more content is available. If you look at difficulties in making content available be they technical, policy-related or intellectual property considerations you also see developments, such as the Creative Commons initiative. From a delivery perspective, extensive high-banded wireless networks and portable devices all point to easier access.

LC: How will this impact libraries?

Kumar: Libraries have always been important players in ensuring resources for educational scholarship are made available. Traditionally the library has organized these resources centrally. Now we are moving into a world where resources, in the form of digital media, are increasingly distributed, giving rise to new challenges and pressures. Providing access to this information and preserving it for future generations is a rapidly moving target. For libraries to continue to serve as stewards of information they must increasingly accommodate this changing technological environment.

Sophisticated tools now perform some of the functions of a traditional reference librarian. But that does not diminish the value librarians bring through being expert in these tools, coordinating distributed information into meaningful forms, and ensuring users are equipped to access it.

LC: Can you say a bit about MIT’s Open Course Ware project?

Kumar: Open Course Ware is doing wonderfully, with 1,100 of 1,800 courses available and the remaining 700 on track to be published between now and 2007. Worldwide access numbers for OCW of more than five million users have exceeded our expectations and demonstrate MIT got it right in terms of unfettered access to materials.  The OCW model has taken root. More than one hundred universities around the world are creating their own sites. The MIT community takes great pride in the fact that people are using OCW to strengthen their own teaching materials. If you make resources widely available the quality of educational discourse changes; that those kinds of impacts are also beginning to surface is particularly pleasing.

LC:  What are the main aims of the Open Knowledge Initiative and what do you feel are its prospects?

Kumar: OKI’s vision is about choice, about creating an architecture to support interoperability and allow educational software to integrate more easily with institutional infrastructures and enterprise systems. OKI helps depress the slope of the cost of integration. OKI future-proofs applications against changing technologies by allowing them to take advantage of campus infrastructure technology but not be so tightly bound to it they may be rendered useless by a shift in technology.

As educators we want our applications to work with the content we need. Traditionally it’s only possible to inspect one system at a time. Our model makes it possible to build federated searches allowing educational applications to take advantage of a variety of repositories without being technologically bound to any one of them, and without having to care about particular protocols or metadata. Uptake of OKI is terrific and it has been adopted by some wonderful tools including Visual Understanding Editor, Search Party, Twin Peaks, Naravision, Lionshare and Fedora.

LC: We all know about the problems of information overload and information of questionable quality. How do you see editorial oversight working in this environment; who will ensure quality control? Will it be government, universities or commercial vendors like Elsevier?

Kumar: I am a great advocate of the free movement of ideas. I think it’s central to the mission of education.  The issue of quality control is a big challenge. Just because something is open source doesn’t validate quality. When you talk about editorial quality there are, of course, multiple viewpoints. One says people will vote with their feet — a Darwinian approach to quality, if you will. Others believe quality comes with history or from the community of people providing the content, many who have spent their lives identifying good sources of material. It’s of course smart to leverage practices and processes that have worked in the selection of good content, such as screening and review, and to rely on a variety of agencies to help ensure quality, be they educational or commercial.

LC: It’s impossible to talk about any truly global initiative these days without considering China and India. What input and impact are these areas having on the electronic information environment and will the entry of more big players into the field mean it is easier or harder to create unity, compatibility and accessibility?

Kumar: India and China are increasingly important producers and consumers of knowledge resources. Networks are not limited by geographical boundaries. That’s an opportunity but also a significant challenge. Creators of content have to be sure they are really interested in global access and global use. To be really valuable content must be maleable, amenable and adaptable to enable contextualization in different cultures and situations, by different students with different profiles, backgrounds and learning modalities.

Magic Paper

LC: At MIT you’re working on interesting new tools to make using electronic resources easier. Can you tell us about some of the exciting new tools we may be seeing in the future?

Kumar: Over the last few years there has been dramatic investment in educational resources at MIT and wonderful applications are advancing our educational value proposition and increasing the bandwidth of interaction between very good students and very good faculty.

One example is iLabs, which provides access to actual labs over the Internet. Students from a variety of locations come together to control the parameters of experiments. The vision for iLabs is an architecture allowing anyone to set up a lab and make it available over the Internet, dramatically changing the economics of a traditionally expensive experience.

MIT students in robotics use tablet PCs, along with software such as PRET that allows peer review on collaborative design projects. Magic Paper, another software environment, allows initial design “sketches” to be interpreted and fed into more formal CAD and computation programs making initial design processes more efficient.

We are seeing a trend towards very interactive learning environments, towards accommodating “adhocness” and using computation to add value to things we do naturally. Sketches can be drawn and animated using simulation programs. Laws of science can be plugged into programs to help a user’s understanding. Technology is being applied to bring first-time experience in a flexible and non-location-specific way, giving anyone, anywhere access. The marriage of mobility and rich media makes all kinds of real-time collaborative activities possible, allowing the student community to participate more fully in campus education.

In this world of extensive networks and data, we’re able to study patterns as we create new tools and pedagogies. These patterns can present opportunities to take traditional approaches, decide that they may not be the way to go, and use technology to change things.