Distinguished Lecture on
"Universities in the Digital Age Revisited"

Daniel E. Atkins
W. K. Kellogg Professor of Community Informatics
Professor of Information and EECS
University of Michigan

In their 1995 paper Universities in the Digital Age, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid argue that the university's value lies in the complex relationship it creates between knowledge, communities, and credentials. They go on to assert that universities are fundamentally built around knowledge communities and that the figure of merit for the application of cyberinfrastructure within universities should be its impact on the university eco-system of knowledge communities.

This talk builds upon this perspective and explores several threads of cyberinfrastructure-enablement that are transforming how the mission of the university is carried out. These threads include e-science/e-humanities, open educational resources, Web 2.0/social computing, and both immersive and nomadic environments.