May 26, 1997

To: UCSC faculty, students, and staff

From: Communications and Technology Services (CATS)

As part of UCSC's continuing activities in conjunction with the All University Conference on the New Technologies in Teaching and Learning, the Baskin School of Engineering and CATS are cosponsoring the following seminar by Peter Denning, a distinguished computer scientist and educator.

Denning was named the ACM Educator of the Year at the association's 50th anniversary meeting in March. He is also the coauthor of a recent collection of essays entitled "Beyond Calculation: the Next Fifty Years of Computing," which the New York Times said was "the conference's most memorable achievement."

His talk will be based on his essay in that collection. We hope that you will take the time to attend this important seminar given by a nationally recognized leader in education.

Peter J. Denning
Vice Provost, Continuing Professional Education
George Mason University

Tuesday, May 27, 4-5:30 p.m.
Thimann 1

Most businesses have research, development, and marketing processes by which they invent and market new products and services. These processes are part of the company's business design.

However, if the business design itself becomes obsolete, the RD&M processes can't, by themselves, keep the firm competitive. This situation happens frequently, sometimes spectacularly. The migration of customers to a better-designed business is a familiar part of the commercial marketplace. What if the organization with the obsolete business design is a university?

Two driving forces--customer-orientation and network-based machine-aided presentation--are driving the university relentlessly toward radically new designs in teaching, research, and professional education. More fundamentally, these forces are driving us toward new conceptions of knowledge and learning.

Historians of the year 2047 may record that information was a myth of the 20th century, a myth that distracted universities from their true mission of embodied knowledge.

PETER J. DENNING is vice provost for continuing professional education at George Mason University. He served as associate dean for computing and chair of the Computer Science Department in the School of Information Technology and Engineering. He is also director of the Center for the New Engineer, which he founded at GMU in August 1993. He was formerly the founding director of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science at the NASA Ames Research Center, was cofounder of CSNET, and was head of the computer science department at Purdue. He received a Ph.D. from MIT and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Manhattan College. He was president of the Association for Computing Machinery from 1980 to 1982 and is now chair of the ACM publications board. He has published three books and 250 articles on computers, networks, and their operating systems, and is working on two more books. He holds two honorary degrees, three professional society fellowships, two best-paper awards, two distinguished service awards, and the prestigious ACM Karl Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award.

For more information, call Nicki Schrock at (408) 459-2435 or send e-mail to nschrock@cats.ucsc.edu

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