She became a kind of stimulus and others started expressing their opinions and having discussions. But the professors also speak of potential pitfalls inherent with such an accelerated technology. Reed saw an alarming example of reduced quality of thought when he assigned his students several chapters in a recent and respected biography on Samuel Coleridge. Rather than do the assignment, a student went to Web pages and came back with odd bits and pieces of information, some of it trite, some of it repetitious, much of it wrong. The technology can sometimes reduce knowledge to information, forget about wisdom.
Computers also make the role of faculty confusing in a lot of ways.
It was only a year or two ago, Zimring says, that most professors refused to accept from students work that had been done by computer, rather than pencil. The more ingenious students got around that by programming their computers to make lines that looked like they had been drawn with a pencil. Herod of Georgia Tech still marvels at having a computer do complex calculations in five seconds that would take a mathematician with a pencil an hour. Yet, all the professors bemoan things lost. And all the professors cheer things gained.