Page 86 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11338.html

Information Technology in Support of
Engineering Education: Lessons from the

Greenfield Coalition

Donald R. Falkenburg
Greenfield Coalition
Wayne State University

Many studies have focused on the impact of information technol-
ogy (IT). To frame the discussion in this paper, I call your attention to
two quotes from a section called Technology Futures in Preparing for the
Revolution: Information Technology and the Future of the Research Univer-
sity published by the National Academies Press (NRC, 2002).

From the average user’s point of view, the exponential rate dic-
tated by Moore’s Law will drive increases of 100 to 1,000 in comput-
ing speed, storage capacity, and bandwidth every decade. At that pace,
today’s $1,000-notebook computer will, by the year 2020, have a
computing speed of 1 million gigahertz, a memory of thousands of
terabytes, and linkages to networks at data transmission speeds of
gigabits per second.
. . . [T]he world of the user could be marked by increasing tech-
nological sophistication. With virtual reality, individuals may rou-
tinely communicate with one another through simulated environ-
ments, or “telepresence,” perhaps delegating their own digital
representations—“software agents,” or tools that collect, organize, re-
late, and summarize knowledge on behalf of their human masters—
to interact in a virtual world with those of their colleagues. As com-
munications technology increases in power by 100 fold (or more)
each decade, such digitally mediated human interactions could take
place with essentially any degree of fidelity desired.

69

Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.