The comments and principle statements suggested herein were derived from a variety of sources. Throughout the world, educators are reporting on the revolutionary effect that information technology is having on teaching and learning, research and administrative management. This is a time of enormous change both in the telecommunications industry and in the applications of communication and information resources in higher education. The use of technology in classrooms literally inverts the typical focus of educational activities transforming the way that education is organized, delivered, and managed.
Classrooms face the world outside rather than the world inside.
Instead of islands, classrooms have become links to communications highways transmitting data, video, and voice to thousands of other sites. Faculty and students have easy access to vast databases and participate in joint projects that involve an array of instructional activities throughout the world by traveling on these virtual electronic highways. Students and faculty in practically every discipline make extensive use of information technology, from the most basic operations of word processing, to courses delivered by televised instruction and the most sophisticated and elaborate exercises in computer simulations. Today, administrative offices from admission and records to the physical plant depend on information technology for their operations. It is generally understood by many of us in higher education that our mission is to contribute to the preservation, creation, and transmission of knowledge through teaching, scholarship, research, creative activities, and public service.