Technology and Your Institution’s Mission

This summer I’ve been thinking a great deal about how technology intersects with my particular campus: a small, residential, liberal arts college. We’re an interesting case. In order to serve our students, we must integrate new technology into our research and our classes. This won’t surprise you coming from a ProfHacker writer, but I believe that technology opens up the classroom in ways that benefit both students and professors, and is ignored at the expense of both groups. But there are technologies that perhaps don’t fit our mission. Because we’re a residential liberal arts college and emphasize the value of close teacher-student collaboration, for instance, many of our faculty, staff, and students view the idea of offering online classes as problematic.

I’m curious about how those of you in the ProfHacker community have wrestled with technology as it relates to the missions of your institutions (please construe “mission” however makes sense for you). Does your institutional culture lend itself to certain technologies? Or, does your instutional culture argue against certain innovations? To ask these questions another way: how should a college’s technological decisions be shaped by local or institutional factors? I hope you’ll contribute to a lively conversation around these questions in the comments.

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user mamamusings.]