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Special Series: Technology and the CEO >> [Part 3] Technology Conveniences

6/28/2005

Yet, more important than the way it brings convenience to campus life, technology helps to establish immediate relationships that are essential to the 21st century campus, offering an initial relationship between the prospective student and the institution, or establishing a more consistent relationship between the enrolled student and the professor. Technology also launches the relationship between the prospective faculty candidate and the campus. It is these various relationships that support the ability of a college to attract students and faculty, but ultimately, technology enhances relationships that serve both students and faculty, and helps to retain their engagement with the campus.

With all the opportunity for connecting that it presents, technology in the 21st century is as important to campus life as running water and electricity. We have come to expect the convenience of instant messaging, constant access to information, and ease of connecting with other members of the campus community.

Technology can be a great factor in retaining, attracting, and ultimately serving the campus; yet, the capacity of technology to connect and create relationships to support community might be the most important advantage of this 21st century convenience. As Rosa Beth Moss Kanter concludes in her study of the virtual world, Evolve: Succeeding in the Digital Culture (Harvard Business School Press, 2001), “Community might seem a strange word to use in conjunction with the ever-expanding virtual world. But one of my most robust findings about e-culture is that it centers around strong communities, online and off.”

In her book, she outlines the hazards of the technology-saturated culture to human relationships, and ultimately, to social institutions. Briefly, Kanter cautions that the Internet can connect or isolate; it can enable community or it can destroy a community. As campuses depend more and more on the convenience of technology to connect students and faculty, and as technology facilitates access to information and the exchange of ideas through the virtual world, the caution to be wary of the ways technology can encourage isolation or be used as a means to undermine community needs to be included in technology planning.

Institutions of higher education are places that must help people navigate the virtual world in a way that is productive in the real world. Campuses need to provide state-of-the-art technology access while maintaining focus on establishing a learning environment that supports students who will become the educators, business and government leaders, researchers, and citizens of the world. Preparing students for roles in our new world requires more than knowledge of their chosen field and facility with technology; it requires a sense of community responsibility. As higher education continues to keep pace with the advances of technology to attract, serve, and retain students and faculty, may we not lose sight of a key part of our noble mission of education: to provide learning communities focused on preparing people for meaningful and productive lives for themselves and their civic and world community.

Rosemary E. Jeffries is president of Georgain Court University (NJ). SunGard SCT (www.sungardsct.com) is the publisher of President to President: Views of Technology in Higher Education (2005) from which this article is excerpted, and is also corporate sponsor of the New Presidents program. Marylouise Fennell, co-editor of President to President, is coordinator of the New Presidents program, and senior counsel to the Council of Independent Colleges (www.cic.edu). Scott D. Miller, co-editor of President to President, is president of Wesley College (DE), and chair of the program.

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