As this example only begins to suggest, the Internet holds the potential to be an exceptionally fine tool for creating densely woven, unusually engaging, and highly demanding new course materials. Such materials are rooted in traditional forms of pedagogy, yet are enhanced by the new technologies. We all know that the daily exchange of ideas and opinions among students, and between students and faculty members, is one of the oldest and most important forms of education. People argue and debate, listen and react, and sometimes even discover common solutions to difficult problems. The Internet creates an array of new electronic forums for such conversational learning.
Communication takes place at all hours, across distances, among people on campus and beyond.
Students, even those who are reticent in the classroom, can put forward their hypotheses and invite their peers' reactions, or describe a problem they are struggling to solve and solicit suggestions from others. Sustained, direct human contact is absolutely essential to serious education, and always will be. The Internet reinforces the conception of students as active agents in the process of learning, not as passive recipients of knowledge from teachers and authoritative texts. Let me oversimplify for a moment. Faculty members play a vital role in the process, stimulating students to ask the right questions, to seek answers in rigorous and imaginative ways, to re-examine their assumptions and provisional conclusions, and to connect their thoughts to a larger set of principles and ideas.