Spiro Pollalis, new head of ETH World Center
"We want to push the frontier"
Published: 15.02.2002 06:00
Modified: 14.02.2002 18:40
 

Spiro Pollalis, Visiting professor from Harvard University, is the new head of ETH World Center at Hoenggerberg. In this interview, he shows what ETH World means to him and what aims he focuses during the upcoming months.
 

Interview: Norbert Staub

Professor Pollalis, what projects are you planning to promote during the time of your stay here in Zurich?

Spiro Pollalis: I see ETH World Center as the vehicle to integrate the projects of ETH World. At the same time, the Center has to serve as an example of how things can be done, as a gateway to the world. I would like to start creating an attractive physical space at the Center, where we can demonstrate advanced technologies to the ETH community, as well as to start implementing an integrated virtual campus that is central to the ETH World vision. On a more specific objective, I would like to have the ETH World competition ideas implemented, with emphasis on learning and collaboration.

What are the basic ideas that motivate you from ETH World?

ETH World aims to improve the quality of work across ETH using information technology. ETH World also aims to increase personal interaction, connectivity, and mobility of the ETH community. Regarding the courses, we should get to a point where a student has access to all his courses and to all information that is related to his/her student life through a single, customized interface that accesses all the relevant databases. Course material should be open and available to all. The asset of Universities like ETH is not in holding the educational material but in its human resources who process the educational material and in the way the faculty analyzes and synthesizes that content. The material itself can be and should be accessible by all, everywhere in the world.

There have been some turbulences in the ETH World structures during the last months. One could see them as a consequence of a ‚philosophical‘ disagreement about the approach: on one hand, top class projects for a few; and on the other, a slower progress, so that everyone can take an immediate profit. - Which way do you prefer?

We cannot follow one or the other approach. We need both. A mainstream approach in order to reach the needs of the many, and support for the advanced projects in order to keep the inspiration and the vision. Our effort at the ETH World Center should be more to push the frontier. However, our effort should focus only on projects that would be feasible to scale and address the needs of the community at large in the near future. Once the technology, the potential, and the limitations of such advanced projects are well understood, they should be passed to others who have the means to deploy them at the large scale.

Prof. Spiro Pollalis, head of ETH World Center.

Are you already adopting the ideas of ETH World to your own teaching?

Yes, I do. The course that I teach this semester on project management brings together people from four places: ETH, Delft, Bilbao and Harvard. We interact over the computer network both synchronously and asynchronously, and the classes are based on 4-point video-conferencing. My lectures, in a modular form, are available on the course’s web site in streamed video. We communicate with discussion boards; the students are uploading their work electronically, and the study groups include students from all 4 places. However, the objective in this course is not limited to distance learning. The course is about pushing the technology to its limits in order to make it transparent and improve the quality of interaction and learning for all courses: on and off campus.

"Neptun" is a part of ETH World and something that especially students are excited about. What do you think about this?

Strategically, "Neptun" is central to ETH World. Working and learning should be disengaged from the physical space. Laptops allow us to move in this direction. Laptops must replace the bolt-down desktops. A few years down the road, today’s bulky laptops will be also replaced by miniature thin clients and wearable computing (a strong research asset at ETH), with large output displays and voice recognition capabilities.

You stress communication technology, but many people argue, that the more IT you use, the more impersonal becomes communication.

I disagree with that. Technology is neutral, it depends how it is used. In all my applications, it intensifies personal contact. The students have more access to me all the time, well beyond office hours and class meetings, they can reach me almost anytime wherever I am, they can reach the class material all the time, they can reach their fellow students much easier than anytime before. It is wrong to think that the choice is between video-conferencing and face to face meetings. When I am at the Hoenggerberg, I can have face to face contact with people on the campus but at a split second I can have a meeting with my colleagues in Lausanne, at Harvard, and at the Zentrum. And the quality of interaction is excellent.

However - what would you say to professors who want to stick to their traditional methods?

I am against any forceful solutions. We should make technology available and easily accessible for those who want to use it. So, I would say to them: "Keep your methods, you should not change what is working well!” However, if any professor is not fully satisfied with what he/she does, if there is room for improvement, then should ask "how information technology can help me to reach my goals?” However, the professors of today are not my target. My target is the best of the new student and professor generation who have been raised in an environment where electronic devices are part of their lives. Coming to the university, they have high expectations. If we do not meet such expectations, we could be creating a dangerous gap between the new generation and the university.