Interesting study at First Monday: "Professors 0nline: The Internet's Impact on College Faculty," by Steve Jones and Camille Johnson-Yale, reports on findings from a nationwide
survey of Internet use by U.S. college faculty.
Early Internet adoption on college campuses has generally given college faculty a head start on Internet use. Indeed, college faculty have played a pioneering role in Internet development and have brought their work to college campuses early in the life of the Internet. Researchers like J.C.R. Licklider and Lawrence G. Roberts were on the faculty at M.I.T. Licklider, a computer scientist, headed the division of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the early 1960s that set the wheels in motion for funding the Internet's development, while Roberts headed the engineers that created ARPANET, the agency's computer network and precursor to today's Internet. Leonard Kleinrock served at M.I.T. and U.C.L.A. and is widely credited as creating the first node on the ARPANET. Robert Taylor, on the faculty at the University of Utah, succeeded Licklider at ARPA and was responsible for conceiving the need for an ARPA computer network and spurring on Roberts and his team. His Utah colleague Ivan Sutherland did pioneering work on computer graphics. Doug Engelbart, on the faculty at Stanford, invented the computer mouse (among other things).
Not only did these and other academic researchers help to create and develop some of the technologies that are at the heart of today's Internet, they and their faculty colleagues were also among the first to use the Internet to send e-mail, transfer files, and communicate online. Universities, in cooperation with the National Science Foundation, formed NSFNet, the Internet's first "backbone."
Research universities began to wire their campuses comparatively early, in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. Other universities followed in the 1980s and 1990s, and soon virtually all campus classroom, laboratory, office, and student residence buildings had high-speed Internet access. The coming of the Internet to college campuses wasn't always smooth: Wiring was often uneven. Typically, it began with science and engineering buildings, then other office and classroom buildings, then dorms and other campus buildings. Faculty greeted the innovation with mixed reviews; the Internet enjoyed greater popularity among faculty from the sciences and engineering departments than among those from other departments. Still, no matter the diffusion of Internet connectivity or use on college campuses, the "jump start" with the Internet that U.S. college and university communities enjoyed put them well ahead of most of the rest of the population and ahead of most industries.
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