Place

One of the issues that is forced upon us as we imagine alternative futures of Georgetown is discerning the appropriate role of place in the university in the 21st century. Most prior conceptions of a university contain as a central feature the location, the campus, and the residential milieu that accompanies the intellectual community. Which outcomes of a university require a shared place, with face-to-face interaction?

In the Designing the Future(s) of Georgetown, Vice-Provost Bass is using a set of design events, in which alumni are asked to identify the essential ingredients of the best of what Georgetown offered them. Most of the important and memorable experiences they relate are Hilltop or Washington experiences that were shared among students or between faculty and students. Some are memorable one-on-one exchanges with faculty in the offices outside of class. Some were moments when a vision of the student’s future emerged more clearly in his or her own mind. Some alumni can relate exactly where this experience took place. The events were all face-to-face encounters.

The puzzle for all of us in hearing these stories is to try to understand which of those experiences could only take place in a face-to-face setting, without any electronic mediation. What of those formative moments can be replicated in some other ways? This question arises because there were no alternative types of conversations/interactions at Georgetown for most alumni except those that were face-to-face.

In the world of Skype, video-conferencing, FaceTime, etc., there are many two-dimensional video/audio communication options. We all have our opinions about these, but, in my opinion, the current generation of those communication tools stretch human abilities to read emotional states, to navigate who has the floor as speaker, to be content with thoughtful silence, to handle conflict, to read the other actor’s desire to end the conversation, and all sorts of other interactional burdens between humans.

It’s possible that all of this will become radically more effective and that the world ahead will produce electronically-mediated conversations that have all of the interpersonal richness of face-to-face conversations between a faculty member and a student, and between student and student. However, I’m not sure we can design the future of Georgetown assuming that such a world is near.

Hence, it’s key to ask ourselves the original question. Which of the key interactions between faculty and students require face-to-face interactions and which can utilize new technologies? (Indeed, are there some learning technologies that might do what we now do face-to-face more effectively without such synchronous dialogue?) If some of the desired outcomes of face-to-face communication can be achieved in some other way, then faculty might have even more time to invest in the interaction with students for purposes that really require face-to-face interaction. As President DeGioia has said, the most precious commodity at the university is the amount of time faculty have to spend with students. Every moment of that time should have maximum benefit.

We all have a problem in assessing which benefits of the education at Georgetown can only be derived with face-to-face interaction. We haven’t experienced how things might work using a different approach. This is a reason that the kind of experimentation we’re mounting with the Initiative on Technology-Enhanced Learning and the experimental programs that might arise in the Designing the Future(s) program is important to all of us.

Trying out alternative approaches will help us learn what is essential to maintain in what we do at Georgetown and what might be better done in new ways. We need a culture that promotes such experimentation and evaluation. Only then can we know when place is critical and when it is not.