I have been interested in the possibilities of liberal education enhanced and augmented by computer assisted methodologies and technologies since the world wide web came to popularity in the 1990s. In the earliest days, hypertext seemed like a new way of sharing texts, a new methodology of publication that truly made writing available to the world at large. As long as you were using the web, or bulletin boards, or multimedia, that was enough to be innovative.
After some nine years working with and within academic computing, technology, and higher education, I have learned a few things, made plenty of mistakes, and come to a few provisional conclusions.
I think we would all be well served by shifting the discourse away from "technology." There is no hard and fast definition of "technology" - it's entirely contextual (whatever wasn't around when you were born). Something you feel comfortable using isn't "technology" (TV), something you feel alienated from is "technology" (the VCR). I've written more extensively on this, but if we stop treating computing and the digital domain as something alien, and extraneous, it will cease to be such a big deal.
We should not invent or reinvent unnecessarily. Build upon the work of others. Scholarship and teaching do not require us to invent a course or a methodology from scratch, whether enhanced by technology or not. Provisionally, I believe we need to think ecologically about the digital domain. This is counterintuitive, because digital materials take up almost no physical space, and use far less in terms of physical resources (other than physical media, and servers, etc.) than analog products. But time is limited, our attention spans our limited, our capacities to absorb are limited.
Seek to do that which we have done before (in teaching, in scholarship, in writing, in art, in science) better, faster, and more efficiently. But also imagine what may be done differently. Think about what has not been possible before.
Do not get emotionally attached to a particular application or system. Learn a little bit about a range of methodologies (for example GIS, or blogging) that actually help you and your students, or advance the cause of your research.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick of Pomona College and many others are asking, "what are the scholarly products of the new millennium?" What is the future of the scholarly monograph, and when will electronic publication in academia become the norm? I am interested, if possible, in finding ways for institutions and humanities scholars to be on the vanguard of those efforts which look toward new models of publication (if that's the right word), and new scholarly products.
