Internet2 and the related federal Next Generation Internet program have raised a strong sense of opportunity in higher education as well as some predictable questions. How do these new programs relate to the "real" Internet? What does this mean for campus strategy and investment? Some light can be shed on these matters by a diagram of Brazilian network leader Ivan Campos that shows how the development of a new technology spirals through distinct stages that involve different activities and players.
As is often the case in the initial stage of the spiral, Internet technology was born in a government sponsored research project. The resulting designs were refined in a partnership stage in which campuses, government, and industry worked together to build connections in expanding ripples from computer science departments to research campuses to a national Internet spanning much of the research and education community. Highly successful applications (such as e-mail and now Web browsers) that linked people and resources spurred demand outside academia, leading to a privatization stage that spawned an entire new industry. In today's commercial stage this industry is rapidly expanding the Internet to reach homes, schools, and businesses around the globe.
By any account, this turn around the Internet technology spiral has been remarkably successful. It enabled ways of sharing information and collaborating with others that are truly revolutionary in that they can spark the transformation of the entire surrounding system. Connection to the Internet is now a necessity, not an option, for a rapidly growing fraction of human activities, certainly including education.
At the same time it has been clear that today's Internet cannot support all the rich, interactive combinations of communications and information that we will need for tomorrow's networked education and collaboration. A practical solution to this fundamental problem is a major technical goal of Internet2 and the Next Generation Internet program. Where do these activities fit on the diagram? What they are not is another stage in the build-out of the commercial Internet. They are instead the partnership stage of a second, distinct development spiral. This means that higher education is really working on two spirals at once and must play to the advantages and requirements of each.
On the new Internet2 curve we collaborate in R&D projects on advanced networks that are for now severely limited by cost, reach, and product availability. We seek critical new network technologies, practical means for managing them, and compelling prototypes of future applications. Participating campuses contribute technical expertise, novel applications, and substantial investments in networks that are not commodity services. Success will bring important new capabilities to the entire community of higher education through technology transfer in the commercial Internet.
It is on the original Internet curve, however, where higher education must reach homes and businesses; share libraries and other resources; improve operations; and support distance learning. It is here that we must transform our institutions today. It will involve virtually every part of every campus. Success will be measured in how we achieve our institutional goals. Although we can rely on continued commercial expansion of the Internet, we must achieve practical, national (and even global) solutions to additional problems involving authorization, authentication, privacy, reliability, access, financial transactions, and funding if we are take full advantage of our interconnections.
Many of these barrier issues are social or economic in that they have known technical solutions. What technology will we choose to identify members of one campus community who are allowed by institutional agreement to use the networked resources of another system? What type of directory server is required on our campus? Who will manage it and by what policies? Will our solution scale up? Will it work with other methods that may be in use elsewhere? How will we organize and finance broadly shared resources? What are the implications for our campus networks and organizations?
Solutions to such "network" problems may require the negotiation of new funding models, standards, and agreements within and among campuses, libraries, publishers, laboratories, Internet industries, software developers, and others, many of whom have operated quite independently in the past. National-scale discussions of this type are beginning within Educom's NLII (on the management of instructional modules and classes) and NTTF (on intercampus authentication and authorization), in the Coalition for Networked Information (on authentication and related technologies for shared library resources), as well as in several other academic and technical organizations including CAUSE and Internet2. We are fortunate that the technical requirements of higher education coincide well with those of much larger segments of society. Even so, it is clear that nurturing the timely development of the required consensus will become an increasingly important role for campus leaders.
Higher education must push forward on both spirals of Internet development, introducing critical new technologies for networked applications on the one hand, and migrating prototype applications and agreements into national-scale testing and secure production on the other.
Mark Luker is vice president of Educom. luker@educom.edu