In the old days - say, about 1991 - college students who wanted to visit each other would walk across the hall. Now they use E-mail.
In the old days - circa 1992 - those who needed help with calculus went to a tutor. Now they can use an electronic bulletin board.
In the old days - like two months ago - discussions in Leslie Harris' class were done orally. Now 17 students tap their comments back and forth by machine.
The machine, of course, is a computer, and it's changing the way students go to college.
No longer is it necessary to visit a professor during office hours, go to the library to find a book or take a trip to a museum to study a painting.
A computer will fill all those needs.
"For art history, I'm testing a program right now that a professor wants to use that creates an index of images of paintings on CD," said Swarthmore
College senior Zach Kramer, who works in the school's computing center. "You can get paintings from the Louvre, from the National Gallery."
Call it education by fingertips. Colleges have rewired residence halls, set up work stations and hired computer specialists as vice presidents to accommodate the rapidly growing use of equipment and technology.
"First of all, it's affected all disciplines. It's pervasive," said Robert Aiken, a computer science professor at Temple University who is studying ways to use computers more effectively in teaching and learning.
"Secondly, students are able to do a lot more work from at home, both with their own computers and with the fact they can network them."
A handful of colleges even require entering freshmen to have computers. At Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., for instance, freshmen for the first time this September were charged $650 for a portable computer, printer and software.
"A couple of years ago we revised our curriculum and looked at what kinds of skills liberal-arts students would need in the 21st century," said Reid Golden, director of Hartwick's Educational Computing Initiatives.
"When people graduate, they will use technology continually. The sooner they get used to it, the better. They need to be prepared for the world of the 21st century."
A century, some feel, when those without computer skills will be left behind.
"The majority of students are not fully aware of all the resources available," said Kramer, who said he had seen monumental changes in computer services just in his four years at Swarthmore. "To me it's almost overwhelming."
