The Low Density University and Lessons from Britannica for the Digital Age Editor's Note: Following publication of my exchange in Inside Higher Ed with Joshua Kim, Dartmouth College's Director of Online Programs, on the challenges facing higher education today, I thought we both might be interested in a more in depth follow up.  This conversation of ours also focused [...]

How an Artifact of the Scottish Enlightenment Became a Digital Age Pioneer Who would have guessed that at the end of the 20th Century it would be a company founded in Scotland in 1768 that would invent a key part of the mechanics that would let people intuitively navigate the electronic flood of text, sound and images [...]

Vannevar Bush The scientist with the most penetrating early vision of the machine’s potential role in helping us easily access the growing storehouse of human knowledge was Vannevar Bush. After he received a joint doctorate in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard in 1916, Bush showed a bent for military applications by inventing a [...]

The Atlantic Monthly's 1945 As We May Think Article In a now landmark article for the Atlantic Monthly published in July 1945, entitled “As We May Think,” Bush laid out a vision of a world in which computers would be central to our social and business life. The article remains, to this day, stunning in the accuracy of [...]