An Open "Web" Letter to James Cash
at The Harvard Business School

Dear Jim,

Well, once again, I can honestly say I was wrong and naive. Do you remember when you and I shared that presentation to the Nobles trustees in early 1994? You talked about Distance Learning as an important theme of the future. I talked about my evolving stages of skepticism and enthusiasm to various phases of technology. I even told you then that I was not yet convinced that e-mail was a definite part of our future! As a person who now gets 50-100 NoblesNet notes each day from students, faculty, parents and outsiders, I realize yet again that "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now" (paraphrasing Bob Dylan).

I am now completing my first course in Distance Learning at Bentley College In this course, we have been connecting from Bentley College to Syracuse University each Thursday night. As you can see from the above picture, we sit in a big conference room, facing a large monitor. The screen is connected to a PicTel intelligent camera that zooms in automatically on the person who is speaking. The image on the big screen (which of course supports "picture in picture") provides an excellent view of our classmates in Syracuse, one of whom (Norm) gave me a wonderful restaurant menu from the Larry Bird restaurant in Terry Haute, IN. The entire system is easily run by a remote control. In the rear of our classroom is a second camera that can be used for flexibility and different shots. On one side of the room is a document scanner that can be used by the presenter to easily display any images that we want the other site to see. In the middle of the room on a central table is a small flat $1,000 microphone that picks up sounds with the quality of Rick Pitino. Anyone who has the hit me button can just press it automatically to make the camera zoom in on her or him. It is even possible to purchase a high-tech podium from which the presenter can control just about everything from a touch panel: document scanner, slide projector, computer display, lights, temperature, perhaps even the year that the Boston Celtics will win their 17th championship.

Although I have struggled with the controls, I have been incredibly impressed with the abilty to create a virtual classroom. You can even connect a slide projector to the big screen since this model by Elmo has S-video and RCA phono "video-out" ports. This $3,000-$4,000 purchase that Terry Horrigan and I hope to make next year will be multi-purpose, also allowing us at Nobles to make our own videos of Nobles faculty like Phillip Burnham and their wonderful slide collections.

The entire setup -- with camera, remote, speaker, document scanner -- could easily cost Nobles over $20,000 if we want to jump aboard in a major way. Instead, my dialogue with Dick Baker is to smart small, launch a C++ venture with another school next year and test the waters. I plan on hiring Alex Slawsby when he gets down with his sophomore year at Brown to do some investigation of the "least expensive setup" that we can purchase for 98-99 which will allow us to test the waters.

Take care and remember that if I made a mistake in 1994 in doubting the future of Distance Learning, it is also possible that Lenny Wilkens made a mistake when you tried out for the Seattle Supersonics!

Hope all is well,

Steve