We are reminded daily if not hourly that we live in an "Information Age" that appears driven by a powerful and disturbingly unstructured quest for knowledge on the Internet. The line between that "quest" and "education" is disappearing. The students whose minds we are helping to form are already, or will increasingly become, a World Wide Web generation; the "Generation W3" of our title. W3 or more precisely, "W cubed", since the phenomenon they represent is one of an explosive exponential growth I suspect we are all struggling to assimilate in relation to our profession as front-line academics. In the last C.F.H. Bulletin ("Research-Teaching: The Fundamental Business of Canadian Universities", Winter 1996, p. 2) David Bentley defines our mission as "introducing students to the results of scholarship". That exchange is being reformulated by technology. The scholarship we pursue and share must be perceived as the "Information" the world outside is so frantically seeking. Otherwise, the difficulties we face in defending universities in these changing times will only grow. Teaching and Learning in a specific university classroom and Teaching and Learning in a Global University promise--threaten?--to be two radically different propositions.

The current mode of teaching and learning in the Humanities at Erindale College in the University of Toronto involves several recurrent irritants that we have learned--however reluctantly--to live with: competition for classroom space at prime times; an ebb and flow of students that at its high points is grueling; complaints about larger groups and heavier marking; increasing improper use of source materials obtained outside the classroom (ie. plagiarism). Contributing in various ways to the above concerns, five individual factors stand out: locale, faculty, curriculum, student body, library. Each of these factors is changing fast, and New Information Technology is both causing and helping to shape that change. The ways we impart knowledge, the contents of the education we dispense, the students we supervise and the forms and location of information itself are shifting:

(i) locale While we frequently compete for classrooms of precise dimensions in which to facilitate an optimal exchange of knowledge, an opposing trend is growing toward a de-emphasizing of the university campus, and the classrooms in it, as a special venue of knowledge acquisition. Ours is less and less a place where teachers and learners remain fixed for more than a class hour or a scheduled teaching day. Other demands call us elsewhere, whether these are jobs in the surrounding community or research in private studies and labs.

(ii) faculty Seen traditionally as highly specialized individuals who impart focussed and challenging content, modes of reasoning and appropriate methodologies that are the product of their ongoing research, university faculty are facing a disturbing conflict caused by current attacks on research funding, combined with calls for privatized research and an increased presence in the classroom. Their heightened role as providers of knowledge and methodologies cannot be separated from their equally crucial role as the creators or discoverers of that knowledge, and yet such a split is increasingly conceivable in minds outside universities.

(iii) curriculum We know the academic content of the courses and programs which we offer depends on the feeding into them of the findings we generate as researchers. And yet, recourse to alternate sources of "content"--the databases, training packages and self-help modules of the Information revolution--holds implications we have only begun to think about.

(iv) student body While we continue to assume that our students already possess a given background and set of skills and are motivated by the ideal of pure knowledge for knowledge's sake, the full-time student, untroubled by monetary worries and concentrating her/his energies on four years of focussed study and intellectual interaction is a figure of the past. What we now have instead, is a harrassed visitor, squeezing in three morning classes in, say, French, Fine Art and History, before dashing off to put in hours at a supermarket checkout, to close a house sale with a real-estate client or to fly to Central America as cabin personnel for a charter airline (these are real examples!); our present-day students are "all over the map". In addition, we must recognize that they come to us "culturally" from a dizzying variety of social, linguistic, religious, racial and other types of backgrounds. Such heterogeneity strains past assumptions about what they know, what they can be expected to know and even how they learn.

(v) library Fundamental to teaching and learning in the Humanities, the library remains a permanent repository of information in the form, still mainly, of books. At the same time, however, the rapidly changing face of our libraries is a clear sign of the shifting paradigm that governs our work patterns. The abandonment of card catalogues is a symbolic symptom of the threat faced by our paper and print-based civilization.

What place do we assign to computers in the above scenario? The incorporation of Information Technology into the Teaching and Learning equation poses several problems, not the least of which is its very considerable volatility. Indeed, no one seems able to keep abreast of its phenomenal rate of growth: "Today's PCs are 100 to 200 times more powerful than those of the original personal computers". (Christian Vandendorpe, "Épilogue: Une révolution à suivre", Aides informatisées à l'écriture, Montréal: Les Éditions Logiques, 1995, 201-11); "With the exception of fashion and car design in its most creative phase, no product has experienced as rapid a rate of renewal through the superceding of its preceding 'model'" (C. Vandendorpe, 202). How many of you have agonized at the time of purchasing a computer at the prospect of it being rendered obsolete by better versions within a matter of weeks? Not surprisingly, the difficulties we have in pinning down such dizzying growth leads to a myriad of extravagant, often contradictory claims. Christian Vandendorpe speculates that the way we perceive language itself is changing: "We are in the process of moving away from the linear transmission/ perception of language and text, and toward intuitive modes of representation that are closer to our perceptive faculties." (204). Joyce Lorimer reports in the February issue of the CAUT Bulletin (Vol. 43, No. 2, p. 20) that Ontario's community colleges are considering "teacherless" classrooms equipped with CD-ROM courses and computer tutorials supervised by support staff rather than teachers as a means of coping with the loss of faculty through early retirement. Toronto high school Math teacher Peter Harrison observes that "when you use ... machines, very often the curriculum slithers away from you" and that, as a result, "...technology will change what we teach." (Toronto Star, December 3, 1995, D6).

On the opposite side, seeking reassurance and tending to dismiss the disturbing effects of technological change, readers feeling threatened are referred by a reviewer to Robert Logan's The Fifth Language: Learning a Living in the Computer Age: "[Logan's] book is a message to the technophobic, book-loving members of the literate class that they can still be in the socioeconomic vanguard, so long as they add the new language to those they already control." (Review, Globe Nov. 4, 1995). U. of T. geology professor, Andrew Miall, in a recent article, "How Do You Surf a Swamp?" (CAUT Bulletin December 1995), provocatively downplays the computer age as a hoax: "The information revolution is largely an illusion. Information searches on the information highway are a joke. They are slow, use incomprehensible search techniques, and are ludicrously incomplete. Most communication is mindless babble. The true costs in time and money are enormous, and are largely hidden." (p. 10). While it may be tempting to "pass", rather than pass judgement, when confronted with such wide-ranging, contradictory claims, my colleagues and I believe we cannot avoid coming to grips with them.

Where are we now? Or rather, where are you now? The majority of you have completed the transition from typewriting to word processing. The changing nature of demands being made on university secretarial staff confirms this. At Scarborough College in the University of Toronto, secretarial services have been almost entirely removed, leaving academic staff to do their own wordprocessing. A quick glance at the university phone directories shows that the move to e-mail is rapidly becoming generalized. You are also growing consumers of logon time to UTLink and the gateways it opens to library holdings beyond our own university. College writing labs make routine use of on-line dictionaries and grammar checkers, and more and more individual courses and departments turn to computer labs as support tools. Many of you in addition make increasingly varied use of other applications for personal research.

What could lie ahead? A level of generalized, uncoordinated and unstructured use of "information" for which many humanists are, frankly, poorly prepared. Generation W3 is only beginning to arrive on the scene (any one who has seen the ease with which many four to fourteen year-olds interact with computers would agree...); in spite of still sporadic reports of universities requiring every freshman student to possess and use computers, and a growing public assumption that all university students, including those in the Humanities, are fully "computer literate", this division has not made that move in a systematic way. Lack of adequate equipment and support, performance assessments that still steer in the direction of print-based scholarship, and sheer lack of time, combine to slow efforts to understand the implications of computer technology for your professional lives. Furthermore, the first wave of computerized teaching and learning aids was so rudimentary and cumbersome as to convince many that it had no place at the university level.

The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web presents a quite different set of prospects. In addition, "Generation W3" is not only of itself a significant change; it is appearing at a time when the unprecedented challenges to traditional paradigms of all kinds (the life-long job, the caring state, ... ) are driving political and institutional leaders to consider untried solutions--however loudly some may proclaim their lack of academic soundness. Consider the following developments of the past five years. The increasing use of e-mail exchanges for the transmission of course materials is taking teaching and learning outside the traditional classroom. Reliance on electronic methods of information retrieval (CD-ROM, on-line catalogues, off-site databases, the constitution of computerized libraries, and multi-media resources on the World Wide Web) are consuming growing amounts of our librarians' time, as the recent succession of training seminars at this college alone is clearly reflecting. You can no longer safely assume that conventional modes of interacting with students will be maintained; budgetary pressures alone will ensure that. Nor can you continue to assume that there is little substance behind all the bells and whistles of multimedia. Among the hundreds of thousands of sites on the Internet, and as the explosive growth of international e-mail gains further momentum, outcroppings of academically valid resources are emerging from the "swamp", and serious scholarly discussions are taking place amidst the "babble". In addition to searching for nude photographs of Brad Pitt on the Web, high school students are also conducting Web searches for information on contemporary novelists in their OAC English course and are tracking down discographies and biographical information for assignments on the music of Vivaldi, Beethoven and Chopin. Queen's University business students are leaving Erindale students behind as they participate via the Internet in seminars originating each week from different parts of the world.

According to Nicholas Negroponte, the author of Being Digital, new Information Technology is making life "asynchronous", and all activities more "personalized". The shift experienced twenty five years ago when this university abandoned its honour programs in which an entire year had to be repeated if a single course was failed, to adopt the "cafeteria" approach to teaching and learning afforded by the then "New Program", is almost insignificant when compared with the implications of how computers are allowing the W3 generation to take command of when they learn, what they learn, how fast they learn and where they learn. As this trend away from cafeteria fare to à la carte menus strenghtens, where will the factors of locale/faculty/curriculum/student body/library be? This is not a doomsday scenario being presented; it is a call to heightened awareness, leading to actions that it is within the power of individuals here to undertake. It is improbable that this university is suddenly going to provide a truly adequate technological infrastructure, although it would be in its long term interests to do so, at least in certain ways (the provision of e-mail accounts to the entire student body is one such positive step; the recent marked improvement in troubleshooting services for computer users in the North Building is another...). In the meantime, the W3 generation will increasingly bring its own competence and equipment with it; the University must provide new ways to accomodate and take advantage of both.

The familiar, five-part configuration described above is already being reshaped by the encroaching paradigm of an "Information-thirsty society". As those who have traditionally been mainly, if not solely responsible for Teaching and Learning in the university, we must engage in an ongoing dialogue with an increasingly diverse and autonomous Generation W3. That interaction will no longer necessarily take place within the confines of the prime-time classrooms for which we still compete. Nor will it afford us the implicit monopoly on knowledge referred to in the C.F.H. Bulletin quoted earlier and which describes "Universities" as "...institutions in which faculty members are motivated '[t]o discover' as well as 'to teach' by the disciplinary ideals that they themselves have established in their university's Appointments, Promotion, and Tenure documents" (David M.R. Bentley, op. cit. p. 1). If we choose from the complacent perspective of such documents to brand the Information Age irrelevant, and fail to participate personally in the creating, shaping and assessing of the content it will convey with or without us, we risk losing Generation W3. That is why, in anticipation of the impact of technology on "education", students in the French program at Erindale are beginning to encounter demands, services and facilities that will soon be taken for granted by the W3 generation. Second-year grammar students use e-mail to interact with grammar students at the Glendon campus of York University; their writing skills improve by virtue of the fact that they write more and more willingly than classroom-bound students for whom the use of written French is artificial. First- year students are conducting a survey of French literature with the aid of a multi-media program, "Marianne". Third-year students are currently working by e-mail with university partners in Montpellier, France, on selected literary passages from the tragedies of Corneille and Racine. Students in the methodology course for specialists and majors consulted a hypertext edition of a classical French text at the University of Orléans, then worked on its interpretation with the help of concordances generated by the Toronto software program, TACT. Linguistics majors next year will be introduced to speech analysis and visualization techniques in the context of their study of phonetics and phonology.

The defense of academic freedom in universities is not only being called into question by less curious members of society, it is also being threatened with charges of irrelevance by a seemingly more powerful and unfettered quest for knowledge on the Internet. Our declared openness to new and different ideas--but at the same time rigorously vetted by a weighty and time-consuming peer-review apparatus of refereed publication and annual performance assessments-- seems strangely out of touch with what is happening so rapidly around us. While many cling to their sense of academic integrity, important decisions are being made on their behalf about the shape and even content of Information systems for tomorrow. It is more and more urgent that we express our own informed views about those needs, to prevent them from being interpreted and imposed by others whose motivation is not disinterested.

Erindale College, University of Toronto