Technology has changed everything; of that we seem fairly certain. The central question is has technology really changed everything. Are teaching and learning, the fundamental notions of knowledge and literacy, the big issues, qualitatively different now (or in the near future) than when I took courses in college or even taught as a graduate student in the early days of pre-www email? My reading is limited so I have little but my experience as a technology-oriented teacher to begin to answer this.

While I might now be identified as an "early adopter" and one of the leaders on campus in using technology, I see myself as more of a follower. Colleagues at Stanford University, where I taught before coming to Wabash College, "turned me on" to using digital images and PowerPoint. We were post-doctoral fellows leading discussion sections for an introductory humanities course on the ancient Mediterranean world. They were archaeologists; I am a scholar of early Christianity whose training had been almost exclusively text-based. They taught me how to think more about ancient "texts" in terms of geographical and archaeological, as well as social-historical, contexts. Images were central to teaching and learning; I began to get a sense of these texts as multi-dimensional. Travel in Turkey in 2000 helped extend this notion that what I wanted to teach was not just black-and-white "texts" on paper but rather the lived experience of communities in ancient cities. I realized than that technology could be a key component of helping students learn about this. Both the uses of digital images and the travel to archaeological sites changed my own research interests, a change which in itself suggests something about how technology changes knowledge.

The central shift in my teaching was the move from using digital technology just as an electronic slide-and-movie-projector (a task for which it is admirably suited and which I continue to do in several classes) to teaching seminars in which the student production was entirely digital. The original teaching experiment was less philosophical than pedagogical. Knowing that students relied more and more on sites such as the Perseus project for their research, I wanted to design a class in which they attempted to build a resource themselves. I imagined them carefully reading early Christian texts and digitally glossing important words and phrases so that a letter of Ignatius became, via image and hyperlink, an entry point into the multidimensional world of ancient Rome and early Christianity. In the original class, we purchased no texts (since all the Christian and virtually all the Greco-Roman texts are online). Each assignment was in html. As with most experiments, I learned as much from what didn't' work as from what did. The midterm and final group projects from this first class are still on-line and I have written about the course in Teaching Theology and Religion. I would hesitate to call it a failure, but there was even more success in the second version, studying ancient Second Temple Judaism and the most recent version on Second Century Roman Asia, which I presented and discussed at the August TELA meeting.

Any reflective teacher would learn from teaching versions of the same course over three years. This has been, however, my central experience and source of data for beginning to answer our central questions about digital culture. I have discussed and presented these classes to several groups of alumni. At one event during Commencement weekend, Computer Services set up several wireless laptops in the room. After the PowerPoint dog-and-pony show, alums ranging from classes in the '40s to the '70s logged in and surfed the sites produced by my students. I commented that a seminar in early Christianity that had produced 12 excellent term papers would not be received so enthusiastically. No one would read the 25 page papers but everyone wanted to surf the sites. At least in a simple-minded way, changing student research and output changed notions of both literacy and knowledge because of the way knowledge was shared in that format. The sites are public and world-accessible. Anyone could share in this.

The contrast with student seminar papers, which are modeled in my field after journal articles, can be taken further. Research, in the humanities at least, advances through argument. Scholars assembled information and produced interpretations of that data in an organized, linear argument of an article or book with thesis and conclusion. The author controls the information to bring the reader to the desired conclusion. The author might be introducing new data, although this is less often the case in the humanities than in other liberal arts. The data will become available for other scholars to construct complementary or conflicting interpretations as argument. Placing the results of our research and intellectual activity--our new knowledge--on the web in hypertext and image is not so channeled. The browser creates the path within the implied argument of the site and thereby creates new knowledge. The knowledge is mediated, of course, but the process requires a different sense of intellectual literacy and implies a different type of knowledge.

An example that comes to mind is the tortuous publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the single-most important discovery for the study of early Christianity and ancient Judaism since, well, Jesus himself. The political issues, both academic and international, around this 40 year-old drama are legendary. A small handful of scholars controlled the publication of these fragmentary documents until they were defeated primarily thought technology. Scholars used computer technology to reverse-engineer the content of unpublished scrolls from a published concordance. What was discovered in 1948 and unavailable to the world in 1990 can now be purchased on CD-Rom. What changes and advances in knowledge would have occurred if these documents had been released earlier? More to the point of our question, would the suppression of publication have been possible in a world wired by the web?

This shift in knowledge and literacy implied (but perhaps not actualized) by digital technology suggests also a shift in power. Digital resources published on the web are public and "disintermediated" in ways that knowledge has never been before. Can, will, or should this change the classroom dynamic? I have heard stories of professors who react negatively to technology in part because of the ways new technologies change established teaching methods but also because it challenges their power as the expert in the classroom. Digital enthusiasts in contrast claim that technology will create communities of dynamic co-learners. I think both sides are over-reacting or over-reaching. There are developmental and socialization issues with young people that technology will not eliminate; college teaching will continue to cohere around a professor. Similarly the technophobes are threatened by what they do not understand-and if they do not try to understand they will eventually fail as teachers. All teachers do not need to use new and emerging digital technologies in their teaching but they do need to engage these technologies to the point of being able to articulate why they have chosen not to blog.

I teach at a conservative (in both the root and political sense of the word) institution. Tradition is particularly, even peculiarly, honored here at one of the three all-male college in the US. Students respond well to this culture; applications and quality of admissions are up and the brand-new admissions website encourages students to think about whether they want a college that takes tradition seriously. Within this particular culture, technological expectations are relatively low. Although we are a highly wired campus, one doesn't choose an all-male college in rural Indiana only because of a desire for high-tech experiences. To honor tradition is to constantly look backwards and to remember what is valuable, what is worth preserving, what is worth passing on. While peculiar, Wabash is not odd. The residential liberal arts college is a remnant of an institution that goes back to St. Benedict and medieval Oxford. Our building cluster around quads and malls, often with a chapel at the center; our students live and eat together in "refectories" and study as a group in the "scriptorium." We are slow to change what is worth preserving, and we should be. One of the changes from the first time I taught the web course described above to the second and third times was that I ordered textbooks. My students at least were not able to learn in the completely digital world. Something was missing for all of us when we didn't have a printed text on the table. Books were still important, and I imagine they will be so for a while.

Bob Royalty
Wabash College
September 12, 2003