TechTalks Transcript
Delivering Web Services on Campus
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Greg Marks [GM] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
May 13, 1998
Audio
• Streaming
MP3
• Download
MP3 (Download
Tips)
JB: Welcome to the CREN Expert Event Webcast for Late 1998 and to this session with Howard Strauss on delivery of campus services on the Web. You are here because it's time to discuss the leading core technologies in your future. This is Judith Boettcher of CREN, one of your hosts for today's session. Greg Marks, our regular co-host of MERIT at the University of Michigan is also here. Hi, Greg.
GM: Hi, Judith. Good to be here this afternoon, and I look forward to discussing all these ways that universities can use the Web.
JB: We're delighted again to have our guest expert today, being Howard Strauss from Princeton. Howard is the manager of Advanced Applications at Princeton and a well-known presenter on Web issues and futures. Welcome, Howard, and thanks for being here today.
HS: Thank you, Judith. I wanted to comment as we start here to say that one of the reasons we're going to be talking about this is lots of folks have asked me from time to time, and especially lately, what's going to replace the Web? The answer I've been giving lately is that the Web is going to replace the Web, that the Web has already replaced the Web, that the Web is so different now than it was just a year or two ago that it sort of has replaced itself.
JB: That's a really interesting question. When you mentioned that, the thought occurred to me that we talk about hardware going through these 18 month generations. Is it safe to say that that has happened to the Web as well right now?
HS: Eighteen months is probably too long a time period, if anything. Everybody talks about Web time. When people talk about the Web, they say, "The Web a long time ago--like three months ago!" Or something like that.
JB: That's true, isn't it?
HS: So I think that there has been even faster changes on the Web than the hardware has changed. And I think that a lot of that has been almost a cultural kind of change. It's as though we just totally changed the kind of hardware we were using, because the Web really looks quite different. Instead of being a place where we go to look at things, instead of being like a glassed-in bulletin board that you stare at, it's now becoming a place where you go to to get services. Not that the glassed-in bulletin board function has disappeared. That's still there, but it's primarily becoming a place that offers services, not just bulletin boards.
GM: As we launch into what I think is going to be a really interesting discussion this afternoon, I'd like to remind everybody who's out there listening on real audio how we'll be handling questions. You can send your questions to Howard during the Webcast via e-mail to expert@cren.net. If you're on the Web page, you'll see a little underlined area that you can click on and that will help you with that. Howard will respond to many of your questions during the session, but most likely will not be able to respond to all of them. He will respond to those additional questions via the Website, so you can look for more of the question and answer exchanges at the Website a few days after the session. Also, I want to remind everybody that you or anyone of your colleagues in Information Technology or elsewhere on campus that may have missed a Webcast for whatever reason can come back and pick up on the archive session at the CREN Website, www.cren.net.
JB: Thank you very much, Greg. Howard has graciously volunteered to also even repeat some of the questions that we've hit yet on the actual live session with some notes afterward, so be sure and send those questions and comments in. Howard, let's begin our session on delivering Web services over the Web by just reflecting for a moment about is it going to be really possible and how are we really going to get real service on the Web?
HS: Actually, Judith, lots of folks have been doing that for quite a while. Again, in Web terms means for a few months. That goes back quite a ways now. But the commercial firms, the companies and things that offer travel services and that offer any kind of product have been selling stuff. They've been doing a lot of e-commerce or e-business on the Web. It's now been about a year since I talked to a travel agent, and I've been flying around the country and going here and there. I book my tickets on the Web. I buy things on the Web. I've bought stock on the Web. Anytime I want to go to buy something, I compare products on the Web before I buy them, and I usually get them on the Web. So there's a lot of commerce being done on the Web, and what's happening now is that that kind of thing, those kind of services that you're getting are now spreading on the campus so that there's a lot of services being offered on campuses, and there's going to be a lot more very soon. Because the people we're talking to are going to go off and do all this stuff, of course!
JB: That's interesting, of course. As we experience these kinds of services on the Web, it starts getting us thinking about what we can do at our universities and colleges with it. You know, when we were talking and kind of getting ready for the session today, you mentioned and put together a lot of ideas about the new services on the Web. In the process of that, we seemed to talk about and converge onto four different categories of services that might be used by campuses. Maybe I'll just briefly mention those so we can come back to those. One category is the administrative and business services of a university. Another category might be how do we really support instruction or academic learning services? Another one is how do we support the technology that we're all using in order to access the Web? And then maybe some general university community services. Things that fall into that category, for example, are voting and parking and news and those kinds of things. So as we go through our session today, we can kind of be thinking about those different categories.
HS: I think that's a good way to split these things up, but I think we also should be aware that however we split them up, we're going to find lots and lots of services that fall into several of the categories.
JB: That sounds great. You'll have to forgive me. I just kind of categorize things!
HS: That's fine. When we talk about them, I might mention a few that I went down and I tried to put them into the categories. I found lots of them that fit just perfectly. Others I found really spilled into all four categories.
JB: Maybe we can talk about that as we go along here.
GM: Let's talk about some of the administrative and business services, and in particular, how electronic commerce can come to that part of the university through the Web.
HS: I think if we start at the very beginning, what we're trying to do is we're trying to attract students to a university. What we might have done in the past--and again, when I say the past on the Web, I'm talking about months ago or maybe even today--was put up some information about the university, and we thought that was kind of neat that people could look at it and get some idea about the university. But today, people can actually apply to the university of the Web. If you think about how you apply to the university today, if you don't do it on the Web, you've got to call up. You've got to get some admissions forms sent to you. Then you've got to dig up a typewriter, probably, to type in the admissions forms or something like that. And then you've got to send them. It's a long, drawn-out kind of process. But today, that's actually a service that's offered on the Web. Go off to a lot of universities--not Princeton yet, but maybe someday soon--but you can just go up to the Web, fill in your admissions application. In fact, you might even pay for it right there by providing your credit card number and things like that. You never have to send anything. You don't have to send a check in or do anything like that, just apply on the Web. Before you did that, you might take a virtual tour of the university. You might wander around, actually look at what the buildings look like and see what facilities are around. You might even wander around the community and see what the town looks like, and get a whole feel of what the thing's doing. This is not going to replace you traveling to the campuses of your choice, but I think you'll be able to get a good feel for this, for the place you're going to be going to, before you go there. I can give you lots and lots of --
JB: We've often seen the Web evolving, and one of the things that causes concern to a lot of people, when you mention sending in your money and everything, Howard, is are we at the point now where in fact I can push a button and send in my money right now to accompany that application, for example?
HS: I know there are a lot of people concerned about putting their credit card numbers on the Web, and I'm not going to suggest that that concern's not legitimate. I don't share that concern because lots of times I pick up my telephone and call somebody at some hotel in another part of the country, and I just give them my credit card number over the telephone. I have no idea who I'm really talking to. I have no idea who they're sharing that thing with. I guess I just don't view the Web as being less secure than me picking up the telephone and giving that number away over the phone. So I'm not concerned about that, but another technology that's coming, that's in the works--you can't see it, too bad we're not doing this on video--but I have a card here which is a cash card, where I can put money, cash on the card, and a lot of computers now have a little slot in them where I can insert this card, and I can actually transfer cash across the Web. So I can pay for things with dollars. This gives me a little bit more privacy, because I'm really moving dollars. I'm not moving any kind of credit slips and things like that. The plan of the people who make these cards is that you'll be able to use them everywhere. You'll be able to use them in vending machines, you'll be able to use them at the Wal-Mart, whatever. Interestingly enough, you can put more money on the thing over the Web.
JB: Those are actually anonymous, then?
HS: Right.
JB: Just like dollars are. If Radio Shack would let me pay for something with cash and not ask me information, I could be anonymous there.
HS: Right. But because you can put more cash on these things over the Web, you turn every computer that has Web access into an ATM machine. You don't have to leave your house now to go to an ATM machine.
GM: I was shocked to see a very small grocery store the other day with an ATM machine. I didn't realize that those little buggers were coming to my home!
HS: But I think the ATM machine in your little grocery store is going to disappear because what you're going to do is, you're never going to get the dollars out and give it to them. You're just going to give them your little piece of plastic which is going to have the money on it. So forget the ATM machine. You'll fill up at home on your computer.
JB: Was it, I think, Time a couple weeks ago had the cover story with the future of money. It may be that the future of money is no money, right?
GM: Just a little piece of plastic.
HS: That may be the future of checks. I've talked to people who process checks and they say that people are writing zillions of checks for some reason.
GM: But there's also, as you talk about money and you talk about university admissions process, you can move onto financial aid, for example, where now you're starting to pass information that there's going to be increasing levels of concerns about security and so on. How do you think about that and where that's headed?
HS: There's a lot of work that's been done on security and authentication and encryption and things like that, and there's lots of applications up that are very, very secure. One application that has to be very secure and that's up, that's been very successful and I think everybody knows about is TIAA-CREF, which is online right now. TIAA-CREF in the past--and again, that's just a few months ago--you could go up and you could learn all about TIAA-CREF and you could see how the stock and bond funds were doing. But today, you can go off and you can look at your own stuff. That's got to be pretty secure, if you're going to look at your own accounts and things. Even more amazing, I think, is that you can go off to TIAA-CREF--by the way, the service is called Inter/Act at TIAA-CREF--and you can decide to reallocate where you're putting your money. If that's not really secure, then I could go in, Greg, and I could just decide that you want to do some real risky stuff on TIAA-CREF and rearrange your accounts.
GM: In the current market, that will probably be just wonderful!
JB: Could be!
HS: I'll make you very rich. Right. But that's been unbelievably successful. They're getting about 10,000 hits every weekday, and about 100,000 different people per month, according to their last annual report. They also say in there that over 1.3 million people have now used this service to go in, look at their own accounts, move things around, that kind of stuff. Now, if TIAA-CREF can do that, students ought to be able to do that with financial aid. They ought to be able to look at their own stuff, their own financial aid package, and they ought to be able to make the changes to their financial aid package that they would do today by trotting down to the Bursar's office or somewhere and doing that. And the same thing should be true of employees. I ought to be able to go in and move my benefits around. Today, I've got to trot off to Human Resources to do that. Why shouldn't I be able to do that online? In fact, you can do that online.
JB: Another related financial service offered on a lot of campuses, Howard, is the campus credit union. Have those moved to the Web yet?
HS: Most credit unions have Websites and they've had them for a while, a couple of years or more. Again, in the past what you could do, you could read all about the credit union. Today, you can apply for loans on the credit union just by going onto the Web, filling in the loan application and the loan application gets sent to the loan committee, who may never really even meet. They might just be in remote places. They decide if this is going to work. They approve the loan, you get notified on the Web. So the things you used to do by going off to the credit union, you never have to do. It means you can do them at home or you can do them while you're on vacation.
JB: That really is sounding like I don't have to stand in lines any more on campus. If we can do away with lines on campus, that would be marvelous.
GM: Let me interject just a reminder to folks that if they have questions or they'd like Howard to comment on a particular possible application in a university environment, please e-mail those to us at expert@cren.net.
JB: Thanks, Greg, for that reminder. As we are checking for some of those questions, maybe we should just move on for a moment to the academic part of our campuses. Howard, do you have some examples of what we might be able to be doing more efficiently in the area of academic services?
HS: One of the interesting things we've done here at Princeton that's been very, very successful is that by and large, we've gotten right of the language laboratories. If you think about what happens in a language lab, a bunch of people go over and they stand in line and wait to get some tapes and get some desk space so that they can listen to the tapes and things like that. We've taken most of our tapes, most of our language lab tapes, and we've put them on streaming audio, real audio. In fact, the spot you're listening to right now, folks are listening to this broadcast. This means now that any student, any time of day or night, weekends, even if they're home in Sri Lanka or wherever they happen to live, they go off to the Website. They select the tape from the Website, and they listen to it. And we can have 100 or 1,000 or 5,000 students listening to the same tape, backing up, forward, backward, because there are no tapes. This is all read audio, so there's no reason to go to the language lab. We still do have a little language lab because we haven't quite converted all the tapes, but as soon as we do, there'll be no reason to have it. It's not just that we've saved the cost of the few people in the language lab and that equipment. It's that the language lab becomes so much more convenient, because it exists everywhere at every time, and we have any number of copies of the tapes that we need, because we have no tapes. I could be off on the side, instead of working, I could be learning French or something like that.
JB: That idea of not having to go into the language lab is just a marvelous type of benefit of these kinds of Web service, Howard. What about something else? Many students are looking at having Web pages and faculty are having course Websites and all the rest of that. In fact, someone mentioned to me at UCLA that there is a project out there called UCLA by Student Pages, where actually it's hooked up to the Admin system. When the students sign on, they have a Web page that appears, and the system knows about them enough to know to give them certain announcements or to put the course Websites they're enrolled in up there on that page. Have you heard of those?
HS: Yeah, in fact, you mentioned that to me and I went out and took a peek at that. That's very interesting. There's a bunch of other things like that. Some commercial companies, in fact, Microsoft among others, is offering a version of a customized Web pages. Obviously a university knows a lot more about you. But I would think also that you could extend this even to faculty and staff. Since the university knows something about you, they can put all kinds of customizable information out there that they happen to know about you. If we look at this thing in terms of delivering services, you'd think it could be extended even further in that a student could not only see what courses they're taking because the system would know, but a student could add and drop courses, for example, or move their classes around or rearrange their schedule or display their financial aid package. A student could change their financial aid package if they needed to do this. So we ought to get to the idea of once we see information, we ought to be able to not just see it. We ought to be able to do stuff with it.
JB: Howard, there was a question that came in linked to this e-commerce that I think it would be good to see what you think about it. The question comes from Tod Smith at Florida State. He's asking your opinion about pros and cons of colleges outsourcing e-commerce transactions such as for paying tuition fees, alumni dues and so on?
HS: Well, I think that there's certainly an opportunity to do that, especially if you find somebody who's done it and who's done the thing well. It's just a matter of then having a pointer to the thing. I think we should mention, in fact, generally that a lot of the services that we're going to offer our students and our faculty and staff on the Web, we don't have to build ourselves. We may, in the case I think that Tod's suggesting, actually pay somebody to do it for us. Another interesting opportunity is to have somebody else do it for us for free. Examples of that might be, as I mentioned earlier, travel. A lot of people at universities do a lot of travel, and you could sit there and you could have a travel department or you could have a travel agent or you could do something like that. Or you could just do your travel on the Web, and the cost of that is zero. There's companies out there who are happy to make travel arrangements for you absolutely for free. The same thing is true of calculators for loans and mortgages and things like that. There's all kinds of free services that are out there, and I think what universities might do is just point to them. These companies are happy to have you point to them and happy to have you use these services.
JB: Certainly that idea of pointing to a service, I know that some of the distance learning courses and programs have actually just encouraged students to go to one of the online book services, i.e., Barnes and Noble or McGraw Hill, Amazon.com, etc., and purchase books from those sites. They actually don't even get into the process that way.
HS: Yeah, and I think that's actually saved us a good deal of money. If we wanted books here for our own information technology use, we used to wander over to the nearest bookstore and pick the thing up. If you're trying to buy a book, you wouldn't wander around to six bookstores. It just didn't tell you to do that. But today, when one click gets me to the next bookstore, it becomes very efficient to go off and look at two or three bookstores, look at Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com, whatever, find the book you want. In fact, the reviews are right there and there's all kinds of additional services that are offered right there, and you can buy the books online.
JB: Howard, since you're on a high speed line, it is only one click and not many seconds away, right?
HS: Right. But even folks who are not on a high-speed line, one can simply turn off the images that are coming down, and then things speed up.
JB: That's a good reminder.
HS: Also even though it's just a little bit out of what we're talking about here, to folks who are using slow modems, 56K modems and things like that, they ought to be aware if they're reading (inaudible) that ADSL or DSL, Digital Subscriber Lines are coming across the United States. It may take a year or a year and a half or whatever it's going to take, but much higher speed stuff is going to be available from your phone connection without being (inaudible) on your T1 line.
GM: Howard, let's go back to the instructional context. There's a general question about faculty members and what kind of support they may need to put materials up on the Web. In particular, we have a question from Alistair Boudreau, who is asking about how the instructor can insure the person submitting work, student papers and answers to questions and so on is actually the person doing that?
HS: Alistair, that's a really difficult kind of thing to be really, really certain of. You can certainly be sure that the work was sent on the right person's account. That is, if I'm Howard Strauss and I send some stuff in, you can be sure if you got the stuff from my account that the person knew my password, account number, possibly even used my machine, using digital certificates. A digital certificate guarantees that at least the thing that was sent came from somebody who knew some stuff that supposedly only I knew. Now, if we just assume that students don't share their passwords, accounts, ID's and things with other students, then you can be pretty sure that information came from the right person. But I don't know how you'd prevent two students from sitting in front of one person's computer, collaborating and sending in the work as if it were one student's, any more than if somebody sends you a paper with their name on it--and even hands it to you, Alistair--you can't be sure that somebody else didn't help them do it.
GM: Howard, are there other areas in terms of supporting faculty members' use of the medium that you've found particularly challenging there at Princeton?
HS: One of the things we've found, and I think this is unfortunately still true today, is that what faculty members want to do is often very specific to the kind of material, in fact to the very course that they're presenting. So it's been very, very difficult for us to generalize, to build something that can be used for dozens of faculty members. We've built a few things that can be used by three or four faculty members, but even there, we've had to do some customization for each faculty member. So it's an expensive thing to do, to do really interesting stuff. To do simple stuff, like a faculty member putting up a Web page with a course syllabus and reading material, or sending e-mail to the whole class or things like that, those simple things are very, very easy to do. But to do the language lab thing, for example, that we did, it's very difficult to say, "Since we did this for the language lab, there's 38 other courses we can offer this kind of thing for." So at least today, a lot of this is (inaudible) because we haven't found a way to generalize this.
JB: Howard, is some of that partially due to the fact that publishers are still kind of transitioning from other types of media resources, and aren't necessarily getting all of this stuff available on the Web yet?
HS: I think it's a lot more, Judith, than just getting your textbook up on the Web or something like that. An example of the kind of thing I'm talking about is we took about 10,000 art history slides and digitized them and put them on the Web and made them searchable, so that students taking art history courses could search these things without going out to a slide room and looking at them. This looks a lot like the language lab thing in that students anywhere, anytime, anyplace can now pull up these slides. But among other problems we had, the copyright problems were just unbelievable. No one will allow you to put their stuff on the Web where everybody can see it, things like that, so we had to pick very selected slides for which we could get permission to do this. Again, it's not very extensible. Having put these art history slides up, this doesn't help somebody particularly teaching thermodynamics, for example, who obviously wants to put stuff on the Web, but it doesn't look like art history slides.
GM: One kind of thing that faculty members at times want to put on the Web and students want to get at is software. Are there ways that the Web can facilitate that part of the process?
HS: It's not only faculty members that want to put software up there, but that's also something that I think your information technology infrastructure wants to do is to get software out. Yes, there are a variety of packages now that are out there that let you use the Web for installing software. I think a lot of folks who are listening are just nodding their heads and saying, "Yeah, we're used to loading Web stuff down from the Web. We're used to loading the latest version of the browser or some plug-in or whatever." But there's now software out there available on the Web that lets you download any software, whether it's Web-related or not. What's nice is it not only lets you download it, but it lets you click on the thing and install it. So there's a lot of automatic installation processes going on. Of course, some other software is bypassing this entire thing and just simply updating itself. When it updates itself, by and large, it's using the Web. That is, you load a copy of Word today, and when you start up Word, Word goes off using the Internet, checks to see if there's a later version of the thing. If there is, I get these little notes from Microsoft saying, "Would you like the latest whatever, (inaudible), new feature, whatever?" All I have to do is say YES and it gives it to me. So even though we're not explicitly going off, opening a Web browser and doing this, using some other application which then uses the Web, very often we're getting the latest version of software and new features or whatever downloaded using the Web.
GM: The CREN Web page for this event lists the URL for InstallShield. You want to comment on why you were interested in that one in particular?
HS: I think that anybody who's installed any software, if you installed free software packages, you used the InstallShield for all of them, or all but one of them, whatever. It's probably the most commonly used software to install packages. What they've done is they now have a Web version of InstallShield which you can go up and use.
JB: And since we have the URL up there for folks, Howard, and they go to that site, what will they see there?
HS: What they'll see, actually, is a way to get hold of that piece of software. You'll just be able to go up to the thing and read what it does and see how it works and things like that. I forget if it's free. I'm so used to everything being free. But it has a strange name, as a lot of things today. The package is called InstallfromtheWeb. I believe that's all one word.
JB: And it makes the whole process easier?
HS: Yes, absolutely. And it does for packages that you want to install over the Web what InstallShield does for packages that you want to install not over the Web, namely you click one button and then it asks you a few questions, and the next thing you know, the package has been installed. This is as opposed to whatever, telling somebody that you've got six files and drag this file to your system folder and drag this file over here and move this over here and do these nine things. What happens is the whole process is automated. It's really a click of a button, and then just checking boxes as this thing asks you questions. It installs it very nicely.
JB: Howard, I think we've kind of segued into using this kind of Web services for supporting our technology on our campuses. How can, say, an academic computing center even start managing and tracking the various versions of the software that might be on faculty machines and student machines and students in the lab and so on? ]�
HS: Well, I think that ultimately, some of it's going to take care of itself as some of the software is starting to do. That is, some of the software goes off and says, "There's a new version out there. I'll just get it for you." But in the interim, I think what we can do is we just have to make it easier for people to get that kind of stuff out. One way you can make it easier is you could put up a Website and you could say, "Here are some links to the latest version of everything." But I think if we really want to offer a service to people, we've got to make it more proactive than that. That is, we ought to tell people when there's a new version, and we don't want to tell them every day. So what we want is something that looks to see if they have the wrong version, if they have an old version, and only tell them when they have an old version that there's a new version available. That kind of service can be offered over the Web pretty easily. You could build a Web page, or a Web application anyway, that would go out and look, see what you have, and with this new version, let you know about that. Microsoft does that all the time.
JB: And what about perhaps the big crisis that we have generally on many campuses in really answering student and faculty questions and general support in the technology area, Howard? Do you know of some good examples of what people are doing with that to help the HelpDesk situation?
HS: Actually, there's a number of companies out there that make HelpDesk software that's Web based. An example is a company called Celerity. But there's a whole bunch of them out there that do HelpDesk software. But even if your HelpDesk isn't Web based, lots of folks who are doing HelpDesk support will take all the common questions and answers, that is they'll take a big Q&A list out there and they'll put it up on the Web so that folks, before they call the HelpDesk, at least have the opportunity to go off and see if the problem hasn't been asked and answered already. Also on the Web, you can put up chat groups and discussion groups and all kinds of stuff so you can get a lot of peer-to-peer help. That's what people used to do before there was all this kind of stuff. Groups of students would sit around and they would chit-chat with each other and kind of help each other on problems. I think we can get some of that again, using the ability to put up chat groups, discussion groups, e-mail lists, all the kind of things that one can do over the Web.
One other thing--we've been mentioning it, and I think it sort of gets mentioned on the side every time anybody talks about the Web, is to remember that one of the great advantages of the Web is that you put up something once, you write it once, whether it's an application or a page or service or whatever, and it's available on all platforms. It's available on UNIX boxes and it's available on Macs and PC's and everywhere, and also that the software to look at all this stuff is the browsers. And the browsers are free, so you have free browsers that are available everywhere on every platform, and then access the same application. That has saved us an enormous amount of time, the fact that we can write an application once and then all the UNIX people and all the Mac people and all the PC people and whatever comes out next can go off and use that thing without us having to write it for three different systems.
GM: Howard, we have a comment that applies in almost every case to categories we've talked about from Adam Arrowood at Georgia Tech. Basically, in his case he describes a registration system, but his point is that they went out and acquired the system from a vendor and have had to put in a tremendous amount of work retrofitting the campus processes to fit this commercial system. They're now reflecting on whether or not it might have been better to build it to suit their own sense of process, rather than doing the outsourcing. That surely shows up again and again in each of these cases.
HS: Yeah, and I think that Adam's aware that there's not an answer to that. It's just a very, very difficult decision, to decide if you're going to buy a product from outside, if you're going to let an outside vendor do the whole process for you, or if you're going to make the thing home grown. And I think that all of those things have up sides and down sides, and it sounds like in Adam's case, the thing was more difficult to fit into his university system than I think people expected. Again, I don't think there's a general rule here.
JB: Let's go back. I was intrigued by some of the services on the Web, going back to what a person can do with TIAA-CREF and those kinds of applications, where the Web application itself, Howard, appears to remember who I am the minute I sign in with my e-mail. That it knows not only who I am, but remembers perhaps some of my preferences when you go out and get tickets or travel and all that. It probably remembers whether you like an aisle seat or a window seat or something of that sort. Are there other applications on campuses where you see or might project into the future--which you're always so good at--in terms of applications that really do remember who we are and what we might see in the future?
HS: I think that you even talked about one whole class of applications like that, Judith, when you were talking about these personalized pages for students. Obviously, every time the student goes out there, the thing gives the student a different kind of page and things like that. But another area, and I think some universities have tried to do this, is that we really have a whole bunch of different constituencies. Today, most universities have just a homepage on them, and whether you're a student, faculty, staff, alum, whatever you are, you go to the same homepage. And of course, the homepage is always www.the name of your university.edu. Now it would be very easy, and I'm surprised more people haven't done this, if we discovered that you were an alum and you went off to www.whatever.edu, you went up to this homepage, why not give you a homepage that's tailored to alums? And if you're a student, you get a page tailored to students. What we fight about a lot here is what should be on that homepage. What we do is we say, "We've got to have some links for students and some links for faculty and links for alums and we've got to have all these different links." But it would be very easy, once you said to the Web, "By the way, I'm an alum, class of whatever," it would say, "Great! We'll give you the alum class of whatever homepage" or "I'm a student," "we'll give you a student homepage." Faculty, staff, etc. That would be a very easy thing to do. We've talked about doing that. It just hasn't happened here.
JB: But you're right, that would be great. The first time you go in, you kind of set up your own profile. You set up your Princeton profile, right?
HS: Right. You could argue, "Well, what we'll do is give you those six different links and you'll bookmark the right one," but it would be real nice to just go to www.whatever, abc university.edu and there's no problem with people going to the same URL and getting quite different results, because it realizes who you are.
GM: Let's segue onto one of our other major topics, and that is the college services. Things like, in the case of some colleges, campus bookstores or parking?
JB: Parking? Is that a problem anywhere?
GM: Can I put a thing in my car, so as I'm driving in, it'll tell me where I can park? Doesn't Seiko make a wristwatch that will tell me where to go park?
HS: That's actually an interesting technology there. But one that actually exists. But getting back--we'll never get away from parking, once we get on parking.
JB: You don't even want to touch it now.
HS: Even in a place like Princeton, it's sort of rural. It's not an urban place by any stretch of one's imagination, but we have a parking garage here now. Our first vertical sort of parking structure, not because we don't have enough land around here. There's tons of land. But since we want to keep the buildings real close to each other, we don't want to have to spread out here. Parking is certainly a problem everywhere, and assigning lots to the problem. I don't know what happens at other universities, but I know that we have to, for example, re-register our cars. We have to fill in these parking forms, and if we change cars, there's all kind of administrative silliness that we have to go through to make sure our car is not cut in half and moved somewhere. But all that stuff could be done on the Web. You could get your parking permits issued on the Web. If you change a car, so you have a different license plate number or a different kind of car, you can do that all on the Web. We're prohibited from parking overnight just about anywhere on the planet unless we get special permission, but again, there should be no reason why we couldn't do that on the Web instead of walking over to the security office. I need to spell something out here. If I were properly authenticated, if I had a real digital certificate, they would know it was really me. This is really my car, and it's really okay if I leave it here overnight, that kind of thing. So all those administrative things really could be done. Paying fines. You could probably do that on the Web too. I'm sure you will get fines for parking at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Another area you touched on, Greg, was the bookstores and things. At Princeton, like at many places, we sell computers at the university. In our case, the information technology group actually sells computers. We have a bunch of people who do that. Our computer store is disappearing in December. It's being replaced entirely with Web applications, and these are Web applications that we didn't build at all. These are Web applications that were built by Dell and by Apple. I'm sure that lots of other folks would do this.
Basically, what we're doing is students in the past used to wander into our little computer place called the Microcomputer Distribution Center, the MDC. They used to wander in there and they would select from our limited list of computers what they wanted. These folks would order the thing then call the students back up, get the students the computers, etc. and so forth. Now we have a deal with Dell where students can go to a special Dell Website, which we didn't build, and students using special identification can order from a list of computers that we decided on at special prices that Dell is giving us, as they used to give us when we had this little computer store, or Apple or the other computer companies that we had deals with. So students will actually order their computers over the Web from a limited list that we've selected at special prices that we get, and certainly other universities can get.
We will never have any Princeton people do just about anything except someday one student will show up at a location where the things are dropped off and say, "Oh, yes, that's my computer" and give us the money or give us their credit card. So we have replaced a bunch of people with an application or a bunch of applications that were built by other companies for us at no cost to us whatsoever.
GM: That ought to make it possible for the delivery of machines on a pretty efficient basis all year round, and solve all kinds of inventory and stocking problems that the campus had to face.
HS: Yeah, in fact, the last thing on earth you'd ever want to do is to take an item like a computer and buy those things ahead and keep them in inventory. Here's something that's going to be obsolete next week. You don't want to stock those things.
GM: Right. Much better to get it straight from the manufacturer.
HS: Right, and especially now that Dell, for a long time, probably forever, has built computers as the orders come in. They don't build any inventory. And now Apple has the same sort of deal on the Web, where you specify the sort of machine you want. They don't build it until you say you want it built. And many other companies are doing this kind of thing.
GM: How about tickets to events? Sports events and music shows, theatricals? Is that stuff happening on campuses, or are those kinds of ticket sales all locked up in other kinds of things that are going to take awhile before they move to the Web?
HS: Actually, I haven't seen anybody doing that, but that doesn't mean it's not being done. There's a couple hundred million Websites out there. But it sounds to me like a very interesting application. It's something you could certainly do. If I can sit down and I can select my seat on an airplane, which I do all the time now. I see a picture of the airplane and I can see which ones are taken and which ones are not, and I can pick just the one I want, it would be wonderful application to be able to see the stadium or the theater or whatever. And when I buy a ticket, to be able to pick the ticket. Now, when you're doing that, if you're doing it over the phone, you're sitting there and you probably have no idea what the place even looks like. Somebody's saying, "Oh, yes, Greg, it's a wonderful seat, you'll love it," and they give you a ticket somewhere. But that sounds like a wonderful application.
GM: I need to work on that. It's an interesting theme that runs through all of these, how basically the Web allows higher amounts of information to pass back and forth. You can see more and you can print stuff and take it away, let's say, as compared to doing a telephone transaction. And the person at the other end can get more information from you. It may be information that's already stored on a computer. And get better ID than just your voice on the telephone. So in lots of ways it's a very natural environment to save people walking all over the place, standing in lines, so on.
HS: Also, I feel when I'm talking to somebody like a travel agent or somebody like that, my assumption is that the travel agent's phone is ringing off the hook and that the travel agent would like me to get off as quickly as I could. And so I'm a little reluctant to sit there and start saying, "Well, I don't want to sit behind a bulkhead and I don't want to sit in a seat that doesn't lean back, and I don't like to sit on seats near red carpet, or whatever." And if they give you a seat, say, "Is that seat over the wing? Is the seat near the pilot?" How many different things are you willing to tell this person, and how far are you willing to put them out? Whereas if I'm doing this on the Web, I get exactly what I want, for whatever whimsical reason, if I feel like spending 20 minutes picking a seat, I can do it. I haven't bothered anybody to do that. And then I can change it 28 times and I haven't bothered anybody.
JB: But then over time, the program starts remember what you really do like after you spent all that time. I think the applications will help us do it even faster. I find that very exciting.
HS: Yeah, and in fact, when I do travel, my profile--it doesn't yet quite know that I like different kinds of seats if it's daylight or night, but one day! It's a question of whether I can see the ground or not.
JB: I never thought of that!
HS: But one could imagine it remembering that kind of stuff. In fact, one could even imagine it remembering that kind of stuff without me telling it.
JB: Oh, I think it will.
HS: You probably know that when you use the search engines and things, that the search engine companies are looking at the kind of searches you do, and that determines what kind of ads you see. So you keep searching on things that have to do with dogs, you're going to start getting dog food ads and kennel ads and things like that. Somebody who searches on something quite different is going to get different ads. Those ads are not random. Those ads are chosen very carefully based upon -- so you never set up a profile at all on these search engines. It's just they're looking over your shoulder, seeing the kind of things you're doing, and getting some intuition about what kind of person you are.
JB: Howard, every time we have one of these conversations, I get both delighted and a little in awe of what the Web is becoming. Unfortunately, our time has just gotten away with us again today, and I want to stop and perhaps just say thank you to everyone who's been out there and sending in their questions and comments. Before we say the final closing things, Greg, do you have anything that you'd like to say at the end here?
GM: I believe that what we've been talking about here is an area that we're going to see startling changes in the way life around campus is in the next few years.
JB: Howard, any other final comments?
HS: I'd just like to remind folks that today, with e-commerce, just in the area of travel, there's about $2,000,000 a week's worth of travel stuff being booked out there. Dell says they're doing $3,000,000 a day in computers, so there's a huge commercial market out there. We've just kind of scratched the service in universities, but if you look what's happened on the commercial side, you can expect to see the same sort of level of interest and excitement on the university side. I think it's going to continue to be very interesting.
JB: All right. Howard, thank you so much, and I'd like to remind folks that they can still actually send some follow-up questions to expert@cren.net for you, and that we will answer them on the Web if possible. I'd also like to remind everyone to put the next three Expert Event Webcasts on their calendars. The schedule itself is only a click away from the CREN homepage. Our immediate next session is two weeks from today, on May 27, and it will be a little bit later in the afternoon, at 4:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time. Our guest expert will be Mark Bruhn of Indiana University, and our topic actually will be a nice complement to today's session. It's called Privacy, Security and Handling Academic Business. Also, CREN is pleased to announce the upcoming release of a new virtual seminar called Creating Internet II on advanced networking. This seminar will be available in two formats, both on the Web and on CD, if you'll watch the Web for the release date on that. One other final reminder is that if you'd like to receive announcement messages for these sessions, to send e-mail to CREN at cren.net. And with that, I'd like to thank everyone who made this session possible today: the board of CREN; our guest expert, Howard Strauss; host Greg Marks; Brian Vaughn at UM Online for the encoding; and all of you for being here. You were here because it's time. 'Bye Howard.
HS: 'Bye, Judith.
JB: 'Bye, Greg.
GM: 'Bye-bye.
