Chapter 6: Visions for a Virtual University

The "Wired Professor"
pp. 220-221

In our conversations over the course of the year that we researched and wrote this book, we used to talk about the persona of the "wired professor"--the alter ego we created who was the composite of the instructors we spoke to and corresponded with. Sometimes we would play with the pun in "wired" to describe professors who were tired after many hours of crunching HTML code on top of their other scholarly and teaching work. This term also described the instructors who would dash into the Innovation Center with some last-minute coding or hardware disaster, as well as friends and colleagues who would work themselves into such a state of creative obsession with their Web-page experiments that they would ask questions in a rapid volley, even as their fingers flew over their keyboards and the answers appeared on their screens as variations in Web design neither of us had ever seen before.

So pervasive has the theme of creativity been at the Innovation Center that George Sadowsky, the director of NYU's Academic Computing Facility, where the Innovation Center is housed, explained that the name "innovation" is misleading. Typically, innovation in computer technology refers to the creation of new software or the development of new computers. Instead, Sadowsky thinks of the importance of the Innovation Center in the following terms:

If you're going be on the frontier . . . there ought to be some place where people can go and experiment, and furthermore, we see it as part of our mandate to understand what the frontier looks like as best we can. We can't do that without playing with these things.53

This concept of creative play has become a part of our conception of the "wired professor." Added to this is the final and most important element of all--a true appreciation for the medium. Before the term "hacker" became synonymous with individuals cracking security on computer systems with malicious or criminal intent, it used to be the highest compliment you could pay a truly creative programmer. In our own way, we have combined that definition with the description of a gifted teacher who uses the Web in ways that enhance it as a creative medium.

The term "wired professor" also describes an older teacher I met at an all-day workshop for faculty interested in learning how to write their first Web pages. She told me that she had resisted learning how to use e-mail and the Internet and had only written her first e-mail a month earlier. She had recently spent a month in South Africa and made a number of friends there with whom she wanted to keep in touch. Her South African friends told her that they could use e-mail, and this is when she began reconsidering her views on using the Internet. Now, with e-mail, she has been able to stay in contact with her South African friends. However, what she wanted to explain to me was how thrilled she was about making Web pages for her classes. She explained that she was going to go home and spend the rest of the evening making Web pages. She added that her excitement made her remember how exciting it had been when she first learned how to use the darkroom and how, in her initial excitement and in the first flourishing of creativity with that tool, she completely lost track of time. This teacher, as much as those who can code without having to stop and refer to a manual, fits our definition of a "wired professor." Each in their own way has been overtaken by the creative possibilities of this medium. Carpenters and other craftspeople often speak of the pleasure of working with their hands. We feel that creating materials for the Web offers the same pleasure--the delight in being able to see what one has imagined take form. With this in mind, we invite you to join us in the wonderful adventure of writing for the World Wide Web.

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