2011 State of the College - Mount Aloysius College

A LOOK AT THE FUTURE We have talked about the past year and the present one. Now let me turn the page one last time, and look a bit more forward—at the future of this College on the mountaintop.

Let me bring you up to date on three topics here: technology, inaugural activities and a sense of place.

TECHNOLOGY AND THE CLASSROOM I said earlier that Michele and I expected our sons to have at least three different teachers in College: first, their professors in the classroom, second, their peers in and outside the classroom, and third, those other “teachers” who appear on and off our campus from time to time—outside speakers, experiential and service opportunities. Well, there is now at least one more teacher in our midst, and its name is technology (can you say “search engines”).

But the reality is first, many of our students really do think differently from most of us. They can’t help it— they grew up in a world where the word “web” refers to “telecommunications”--not to “spiders”—they grew up in a world where the world wide web always existed, they grew up in a world where there was no such thing as the USSR or even East Germany, and they live in a world where their preferred method of communications is a text message with preferably no more than 140 characters. Let’s face it, they live in a world where if Facebook were a country it would be the third largest on the planet.

So first, they think differently. Their neurons travel different networks, their trail of synapses would read like Greek to us, if we could even imagine them.

Second, and I know this drives many of us—particularly the English Department--crazy, they write differently.

They can’t help it—look at the new language. And the majority of them who use Twitter write in minimum word/maximum acronym 140 character single sentences.

Third, they research differently. Forget the “Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature,” they have