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The integration of technology into learning and teaching in the liberal arts. (Perspectives).

Article Excerpt
AS LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATORS, we want to empower our students to become lifelong learners and creative and critical citizens of a media-intensive world. Well-educated citizens need to understand technology and how to communicate within new media effectively in the same way that they need to be able to write. Our students will be creators of, participants in, and observers of various means of digital communications. We take this into consideration as we strive to provide our students with the richest learning environments and the best preparation for lifelong learning. Our students, because they are exposed to ideas from diverse disciplines, have a lot to contribute to the world as communicators in digital media. Students learn valuable things about themselves and about the general nature of communication through grappling with these sometimes difficult media and articulating their ideas effectively through them.

Over the past several decades, the ways in which college faculty, students, and administrators communicate with one another and access information have changed dramatically. At our campus, as at most campuses in the U.S., faculty members have computers in their offices and most have them at home as well; we communicate regularly and frequently via e-mail and access information at record speed over the Internet. Nearly all of our students arrive with their own computers. We are wiring and changing our classrooms, dormitories, and library to accommodate new technologies. We are restructuring our information technology services and struggling to keep up with demands for support.

New technologies offer rich opportunities for enhancing the skills that liberal education seeks to develop. What is striking about technological change on liberal arts campuses is the constant effort to measure these advances against the overall goals for student learning that remain at the core of our mission. Infrastructure in terms of hardware, software, and support are crucial, but without a faculty dedicated to delivering the goals of liberal education, expensive "advances" might in fact work against the intense student-centered learning environment we seek to foster.

Starting the project

At Grinnell College, where significant changes have occurred in the ways education is delivered, discussions about teaching with technology have been less about technology and more about the student learning and effective pedagogy that lie at the core of our educational mission. We began serious institution-wide discussions in answer to an invitation from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1994. The Foundation invited a number of liberal arts colleges to apply for funding to support the integration of technology into their curricula. The invitation asked colleges to consider taking advantage of the opportunities offered by technology in the teaching of foreign languages, in addressing curricular and teaching implications of new forms of access to data bases and library information, and in considering alternative modes of student learning.

In 1995,...