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Chapter 8 Technology in Education Revolution or Evolution? Adam F. Falk President, Williams College It seems you can’t pick up a newspaper or magazine—The New York Times education section, Chronicle of Higher Education, EDUCAUSE Review—without encountering the passionate assertion that information technology has changed everything about our students and how we must educate them. Streaming video. Chat rooms. Laptops. iPods. Course management systems. iPads. The list goes on, and it will continue to go on, as a seemingly endless stream of new technologies emerges. There’s no doubt that all this technology is fun and interesting, and it presents new and innovative ways to do the work of preparing young women and men to engage the world as educated and thoughtful adults. But there are those who would make a stronger statement: that these new technologies have changed, or will soon change, the very fundamentals of a liberal arts education. Even at a place as seemingly secure as Williams, with our 219 years of history and our enduring metaphor of a faculty member on one end of a log and a student on the other, I hear concerns about our coming obsolescence in the face of the computer and Internet revolutions. Will Williams still matter? Will a liberal arts education offered in the mountains of rural New England become irrelevant to the tweeting students of the twenty-first century? Too slow, too stodgy, too boring? Do we at Williams, and at all liberal arts colleges, need to become something completely different if we are to survive? My response to this question is unambiguous: notwithstanding the very real changes that technology has brought, the core fundamentals of education, both the education we offer at Williams and education as a larger practice, remain intact . Moreover, we should fiercely resist the reflexive conclusion that because our students come to Williams with different modes of encountering and absorbing Technology in Education: Revolution or Evolution? 97 information (multitasking, multimedia, instant access, short attention spans) we must become like them if we are to reach them and educate them. Rather, I believe our task to be the opposite: to understand both the advantages and the deficits that this new world of continuous information flow provides and use the brief opportunity of students’ time in college to reinforce the capacity and disposition for slow, reflective, and difficult engagement with ideas. In fact, our students are, more than ever, hungry for just this sort of experience. Earlier Forms of Distance and Self-Paced Education Our current situation is hardly novel. The invention of the printing press might have been thought to presage the end of the university (“Why bring all these students to Oxford when we can just send them all the books by horseman? That would be much cheaper and more efficient, and they could study at their leisure at home, when most convenient.”) But no such thing occurred. Quite the contrary , of course. And there are more recent examples of times when innovative uses of technology didn’t end education as we know it. I offer three from my own experience. When I was seven years old, my favorite Saturday morning activity was to get up early and watch reruns of Gilligan’s Island. But if I got up too early (in those days when there were only four channels), I had to put up with the tedium of both the Farm Report and Sunrise Semester, which ran at 6 a.m. on CBS. Sunrise Semester, which lasted from 1957 to 1982, was New York University’s first experiment in distance education. Real courses were offered, with NYU faculty broadcasting from a studio in New York. According to the NYU website, the first course offered was “Comparative Literature 10: From Stendhal to Hemingway,” taught by Prof. Floyd Zulli. Students could receive college credit by paying $75. Some 700 applied, 177 completed the course, and 120,000 followed the courses on television without signing up.1 (Incidentally, these numbers are similar to those for “Machine Learning,” offered in the spring of 2012 by a Stanford professor under the auspices of Udacity.) Sunrise Semester was a great success. It ran for a quarter of a century, won an Emmy Award, and was viewed by millions of people. It began in 1957, at the dawn of the modern era in which television sets became ubiquitous in American homes. Certainly, the pioneers of Sunrise Semester must have entertained the idea that with access to the best lectures...

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