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The bulk of the faculty certainly falls somewhere between
these two extremes, but just where is difficult to measure. What scant evidence
there is seems to point somewhere toward the "old-school" end of the
spectrum. Though no one seems to be keeping a tally, it appears that the number
of Dartmouth classes with a Web site where students can find a syllabus,
updated assignments, and an instructors office hours are outnumbered by those
classes without a Web site. It's not for lack of tools. Academic Computing
makes available to every teacher, with training, a customized off-the-shelf
course-management program called Blackboard. But last fall, only 160 out of 400
classes were using it. On the other hand, that's up from 75 the previous
year.
 Why have so few of the College's professors taken their
courses digital? Some would ask it the other way: Why have so many? In a major
liberal arts college with undergraduate degrees awarded in 54 majors, computing
for many of its teachers is just another discipline. It may have a national
reputation and a rich history, they'll argue, but it's still just that: another
field. Not ours.
Most of those who administer computing at Dartmouth today would argue that's
wrong. Computing at Dartmouth isn't the field, they'll explain; it's the
fertilizer, and it's spread over many academic fields. Keep it fresh and spread
it thick, they believe, and lots of things will grow. It's up to the individual
user, they argue, to sort the weeds from the crops; our job is to keep the
whole place up-to date and ready to bear fruit. The new wireless network is as
fresh a layer as anyone has anywhere. But of course, it's not that simple. Not
at a 235-year-old institution with 580 tenure-track faculty, where one
professor's welcome layer of technological help is another's unnecessary pile
of bovine ordure.
"Look," says Professor Jernstedt, "we knew 25 years ago that
the lecture model didn't work. Everybody knew it. Has that changed the way most
teachers teach? No. Does that mean we're going to quit working on better
models? No."
At Dartmouth, it's a good bet that those better models will be, in one form
or another, computer-based. It's been that way for almost half a century.
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