The Universities and Technological Change

What do all the technological changes our world is undergoing mean for the university? Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, has a reflection on that, published recently in the New York Times. He notes first of all, the universities are extremely conservative institutions. Some of his thoughts include: less emphasis on memorization, more collaboration, more use of online technologies, and more emphasis on the analysis of data. In the same issue of the New York Times, an article told of a professor at Duke, who has students in her class write blogs rather than research papers. The article has the provocative title "Blogs Vs. Term Papers."