Teaching and research take exciting -- and unexpected -- turns as everyone at Harvard becomes wired into the Web

By Andrea Early

Special to the Gazette

Law student Anne Gaeta logs on to it over coffee in the Law School's funky new Cyber Café. Professor Larry Benson uses it to post his syllabus for Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, and to encourage lively online discussions on this classic work. Astrophysicist Stephen Murray uses it almost everywhere -- at work, at home, even in his car -- to keep up with a field that changes at what seems like the speed of light.

These are just some of the ways the World Wide Web has become an integral part of the lives of students, professors, and researchers at Harvard. It is a study in sweeping change -- change that is happening in nearly every area of the University, seemingly overnight.

It was the impetus for a major renovation of the Law Library. It has all but done away with the use of paper in Business School classrooms. It is making clinical and research information readily available to students at the Medical School. It is considered a valuable teaching tool in the Arts and Sciences. And most information about the University's libraries -- and an increasing part of their collections -- is now accessible via the Web.

So why has the Web brought about so much change?

"It's a tool for providing electronic information that has done away with the task of having to write desktop software to support the process," says Dale Flecker, associate director for planning and systems at the Harvard libraries. "It's also easy to use, and it suddenly made it easy to publish material electronically," he says. "All sorts of information systems are using Web gateways [now]. They provide dramatically better interfaces than simple telnet [a text-based information technology tool and Web predecessor] and access to visual information that wasn't previously available. It's much easier to use information systems you can guide people through."

Flecker created and oversees HOLLIS, Harvard's electronic library catalog, and HOLLIS Plus, a gateway to libraries, periodical indexes, and other worldwide resources on the Web. For libraries who are in the business of providing information to people, [the Web] is a major breakthrough," says Flecker. "It's making a lot of things possible that looked like they were going to be difficult."

Another area where the Web is making the difficult easier is in

astrophysics, where time is of the essence and e-mail has become almost as important as the telescope. "It's a field where nature gives you an opportunity and you need to take full advantage of it while it's happening," says Stephen Murray, associate director of the High Energy Astrophysics Division at Harvard's Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Murray cites the information-sharing facilitated by the Web as crucial to maximizing opportunities to study such fleeting astronomical phenomena as supernovas or comets. "I think it's true that astronomers have been at the leading edge of using this technology. It's a very open science. I think it has benefited us a great deal," he says.

The Web has benefited astronomers in a number of ways. According to Murray, it has provided access to scientific journals, many of which are now available online; it makes data like the archives of the Hubble Space Telescope readily available; and it creates a collaborative environment that enables scientists to work together as if they are in the same room.

Murray finds the collaborative aspects the most exciting. "It has increased the speed at which information is moving and people are staying current, and it has created the advent of interdisciplinary activity," he says. "Someone who looks at a comet may find themselves looking at it with someone who is an expert in x-ray emissions. That's something that is now a new area of astrophysics, and it wouldn't have happened unless information was so readily available."

Information-sharing is also a welcome aspect of the Web at the Medical School. "It has helped us deploy information to the faculty and students," says Dan Moriarty, associate dean for information technology at the Medical School. That's no small feat considering its 18 hospital affiliates and 14,000 faculty members. Moriarty says the school is in the early stages of becoming "Web-centric," and predicts that most information related to educational and research activities will eventually be delivered via the Web.

One of the earliest uses of the Web at Harvard, and of the technology in general, was the Harvard Medical Web, developed and administered at the Countway Library of Medicine since 1994. So says Elizabeth Wu, associate director for research and systems at the Countway, who has partnered with faculty to help create numerous sites that make biomedical information readily available on the Web. "The Whole Brain Atlas," for example, is a Web site offering a variety of information on the brain, including a graphical tour of a normal brain, and scans of a variety of brain diseases. "The Web is facilitating communications and fostering partnerships that may ultimately lead to medical advancements," says Wu.

The Harvard Medical Web is also facilitating the newly funded Harvard Medical Center (HMC) Network. Moriarty says the network is one of the school's most substantial Web projects. A collaboration of the Office for Clinical Affairs, the Department of Information Technology, and the clinical departments at Harvard's affiliated hospitals, the network provides Web access to profiles of the school's clinical departments, faculty and their research specialties, and educational and training profiles and material. It also offers student fellowship information and online application forms, and will support and centralize clinical teaching files featuring virtual patients, video clips, and pertinent medical records like x-rays and other scans.

Medical and scientific uses of the Web seem logical. But how has it played in the humanities?

"We eased into it by creating substantive examples for instructors to look at," says Paul Bergen, manager of the Instructional Computing Group in Faculty of Arts and Sciences Computer Services. "I felt strongly 'if we build it, they will come.' There's no question they're coming, and they're continuing to come," he says.

One early Web site Bergen created was for professor Larry Benson's course on Chaucer. "One of the site's most successful aspects," says Bergen "was an online discussion that led to exchanges between students on substantive questions like 'What is tyranny?' It provided an opportunity for students to interact with the information," he says. The site provided access to Benson's own translations of Chaucer, as well as an audible guide to Chaucerian pronunciation and grammar, enabling students to listen in their dorm rooms. Today, course Web sites for everything from Shakespeare to fine arts, economics, history, anthropology, and music have joined the Chaucer site.

"This is often a student-driven frenzy, but participation of the teaching staff is critical to making course sites useful," says Bergen. He also oversees Web sites for a number of science courses, including the biological sciences, chemistry, and physics. Overall, Bergen's records indicate that at least 3,500 Harvard undergraduates have used the FAS server in the past three months. And while students are using the Web with ease, he and his staff are still educating course instructors. Bergen says the introduction of a Web site creation tool planned for fall '97 will soon enable faculty to set up course sites of their own, without having to use the Web programming language known as HTML. "Our goal is to have our entire course catalog online, with a Web page for each course that wants one," he says.

At the Business School, this goal has already been realized. After a yearlong transition, and a major overhaul of an outdated network, students, professors, and administrators now use the school's internal Web for -- as Susan Rogers puts it -- "everything."

"Every course in the school uses it, and all of the content is put there by the faculty," says Rogers, the school's chief technology officer. Indeed, thanks to templates designed to make the process easy, professors create syllabi and course materials they can change daily. All course materials, previously available in paper form or in the classroom, are now accessible at the click of a mouse. The other obvious benefit of the Web is that it provides students and faculty a gateway to business experts and resources throughout the world.

Rogers says one reason for the success of the school's technological transformation -- hailed in a recent issue of PC Week -- is its modular nature. "It's essentially like building blocks," says Rogers. "It's a path-based development model. We understand the paths that we and the users are on and are committed to continuously improving the system." Rogers says faculty

can either use the technology the school has customized for them in its basic form, or they can be as creative as they like in using the Web to give their students access to external Web sites, documents, spreadsheets, and even video clips. "Think of our Web publishing software like a word-processing package," she says. "You can use it to present a simple set of questions or to provide access to multi-layered research sources."

One professor who uses the Web enthusiastically is Charles Nesson at the Law School. "It hasn't fundamentally changed the way I teach, but it has served as a tool that helps me teach more effectively," says Nesson, Weld Professor of Law. He uses the Web in all three of his courses: Evidence, Torts, and a seminar on cyber issues, and he programs his sites himself. He says he changes his online syllabi frequently, and adds Web links to pertinent information -- such as a legal document that might be discussed in class -- whenever he can. Nesson has also created a number of popular online forums for his students, and says his recent fall Torts class came close to full participation in the electronic forum. "It's an opportunity for students to write and argue and relate to their fellow students and faculty," says Nesson. "The opportunity to do legal writing and to have to defend it is valuable, especially for first-year students," he says, adding that the Web also allows students to publish their work.

Like the Business School, the Law School has been busy building the framework to accommodate its increasing use of the Web. According to Susan Vik, the school's director of information technology services, the school now has high-speed Ethernet connectivity and everyone has access to the Web. "All faculty and administrative offices have Web connections at the desktop, and we wired all of the student dorms in the summer of 1996," says Vik.

For off-campus access for students, faculty, and staff, the school provides remote packages that contain e-mail and Netscape, and other connectivity software.

The law library is also getting a technological upgrade. After a 15-month renovation project, the library -- now operating in two temporary locations -- will reopen next fall with 110 networked computers, and 700 Ethernet connections. The computers and laptop connections will enable students to log onto the Web, and gain ready access to LEXIS/NEXIS and WESTLAW -- online research services featuring access to federal and state court case law and statutes, treatises, law reviews, and periodicals.

First-year law student Anne Gaeta likes the fact that the school uses Web technology. She says she uses the Web often, and occasionally spends time between classes in the school's new Cyber Café, a brightly decorated gathering place wired so students can check out the Web over coffee or lunch. But it took her a while to become accustomed to the technology. "As an undergraduate, I had only used a computer for word processing," says Gaeta. She says she was also initially intimidated by the thought of posting her opinions -- publicly and in writing -- on the online forum for her fall Torts class with Nesson.

Thanks to Torts and a helpful Board of Student Advisors, Gaeta is now comfortable with the Web. "It's easier to reach people, to leave messages, and to stay in touch with professors," she says. She also uses it to keep up on campus events, for its online law resources, and to access online class materials when they are available. Gaeta says the more successful course Web sites she has seen are those the professors change often and actively participate in.

Belinda Lew echoes Gaeta's sentiments. Lew, a Chemistry 10 teaching fellow and first-year graduate student, says her students like the Web for its convenience, and because they can provide course feedback and ask questions anonymously. Like Gaeta, the students in Lew's freshman chemistry lab section initially had to be encouraged to use the Web. "But they caught on quickly and use it frequently now," she says. Lew herself uses the Web "mostly for teaching" but anticipates using it to access scientific journals she will likely need later in her academic career.

It may be too soon to tell how the Web will ultimately change the way Lew and her fellow students experience Harvard, or how it will affect the University as a whole. But as President Neil L. Rudenstine said in a speech at last spring's Harvard Conference on the Internet and Society, "There is a close fit -- a critical interlock between the Internet and university learning." It is a statement that seems to ring truer each day, as more and more students, professors, researchers, and administrators embrace this powerful tool.