In the 1980s, the world witnessed a technology revolution. Along with this came the promise that our lives - at home, work and school - would never be the same. Institutions of higher learning bought into that promise in a big way. Studies show that the average university invests 6 to 7 percent of its total budget in technology. But are the promises made the promises kept?

While touring Benedictine University's new Margaret and Harold Moser Center for Adult and Professional Studies in Naperville, I was immediately impressed with the state-of-the-art everything - from adult-style seating to computers to a new phenomenon called "the Smart Board." The Smart Board takes the computer in the classroom to a whole new level. Have teaching and learning been transformed by this revolution, and how?

When I came to Benedictine University in 1995, I experienced the same phenomenon I had experienced at other institutions. The technology staff supported several operating programs, there was no one standard desktop across campus and faculty were given no direction how to employ the advancements in technology in their classrooms.

However, in 1997 we hired technology directors who had an international knowledge base and a national pool of people from which to draw. We migrated to PeopleSoft's administrative software and Microsoft Office, which brought order to our confusion and uniformity to our approach to information technology. In a very real sense, these pioneers created the technological highway on which future generations of administrative tasks, teaching and learning at Benedictine would run.

Moreover, in the past five years, the University has been the recipient of a Title III Strengthening Institutions Grant from the federal government that has provided state-of-the-art hardware/software and, more importantly, has trained faculty in the latest advances in classroom technology.

With such a drastic change in the tools available to academia, the very possibility of reinventing the classroom now exists. Faculty is challenged to examine assumptions with which they approach the classroom and to determine whether these assumptions are valid in the light of the technological revolution. For example, most college courses are taught on a credit model. Basically, 45 hours of classroom time translates into three credits -
120 credits or 1,800 hours equal a college degree. Yet credits have nothing to do with learning; they are simply a device invented by accountants to develop billable hours -
certainly a useful business function but not necessarily germane to teaching and learning.

Of the 1,800 hours required to earn a degree, most have traditionally been devoted to lectures. In the medieval university, the teacher stood at the lectern and read to the students from books made scarce by the absence of the printing press. The student's task was to copy as accurately as possible the words dictated by the lecturer (the word "lecture" is from the Latin, legere, "to read"). The lecture format, developed because of the scarcity of textbooks, no longer motivates students. As the invention of the printing press marked the emergence of mass-produced books, the technology revolution is a harbinger of the demise of the lecture format. In fact, in my own experience as a faculty member, I got a lot out of the lecture format. I learned the material far better than when I was a student because as the person delivering the lecture, I was expected to be the "expert" in the field. When students ask questions, your credibility is on the line if you are not able to provide some reasoned response.

Just as the lecture format was invented to deliver content, technology has created numerous ways to exchange information. No longer does the teacher need to be the "sage on the stage," but can now become the "guide on the side." Time once devoted to delivering information can now be spent processing, interpreting and employing that information.

The technological revolution has provided huge online resources for use in and out of the classroom. Accumulating information is no longer a simple matter of copying from "her lips to my notebook," but has become a world-wide process of steering intensely powerful search engines to detect and present the materials for which one is searching. Huge online libraries are now available as access to some of the most prestigious journals and sites in the world. What was once available only to the wealthy and elite is now available to anyone with a computer hooked to the Internet.

Our challenge now is to prepare a new architecture for learning, one that recognizes that the very processes of teaching and learning have been transformed by the wealth of information technology makes available. This new architecture will not merely replace the lectern and rearrange the furnishing of the classroom, but will recast the very environment in which teaching and learning take place.

Students, too, have changed as learners. Today's students pose a serious challenge to the appropriateness of traditional pedagogies. Students are of the "Nintendo Generation," the "Y Generation," etc. They come to us computer-literate, oriented toward multi-task environments and experienced as multi-sensory learners.

Benedictine University has prepared a robust technological environment for this new class of students. The Moser Center is testament to that environment. Our faculty has come a long way in adapting technology to the classroom. Yet the pedagogical revolution, on the back of the technological revolution, has just begun. Ubiquitous technology on our campuses demands that we challenge the very assumptions on which traditional pedagogy is based - it challenges us to develop a new architecture of learning. Looking ahead, the new architecture for learning will transform the academy by re-conceiving the nature of teaching, learning and work; removing time and space constraints; and building collaborative learning skills necessary for the 21st century.

Benedictine University has boldly moved forward to secure the tools and resources necessary for its students and faculty to be successful in the 21st century. We have recast our library and classrooms, indeed the entire campus, to exploit fully the tools of tomorrow - available today.

Today's faculty is in a unique position not enjoyed by generations of their predecessors. They have the ability to redefine and reinvent the classroom. If you walk the halls of Benedictine, you will experience this reinvention as it occurs. Our faculty has accepted the challenge. We have taken great leaps in adopting the tools of the 21st century and employing them in our classrooms. As this becomes the century of change, the classrooms at Benedictine are and will be an arena where that change plays out.