'A new generation has grown up with technology and is as comfortable with a keyboard as with a pen'

Earlier this year, a professor of law at a state university in the US became frustrated by the misuse of laptops in class and ordered her students to leave them at the door. June Entman, who teaches at the University of Memphis, told her students that the computers interfered with eye contact and impeded interaction. While many academics feel unhappy at the incursion of laptops, few have taken such a drastic step. They recognise that much of the impetus for the introduction of new technologies for undergraduate teaching comes from students. A new generation has grown up with technology and feels as comfortable - if not more so - with a screen and keyboard in a lecture or seminar as with a ballpoint pen and notepad.

Academics may be nostalgic for the set-piece lecture delivered from a handful of notes - in essence a theatrical performance designed to have an effect on students' thought processes. But the lesson of the US is that students want to access lectures and other resources online and prefer to do so within the structure of a web-based virtual learning environment.

They also expect wireless access across the campus, so the student at the back of the class is as likely to be playing solitaire or downloading the latest Arctic Monkeys track as they are to be taking notes. Academics in the US and the UK have to judge the extent to which the technology stampede should be led by students and the degree to which it should be moderated by academic caution. Students are not necessarily the wisest judges of their own best academic interests: they may go for convenience and easy solutions over the hard slog that is often the route to academic success.

There are positive points to the adoption of technology for academics, but a recent study by Peter Sutch and Peri Roberts at Cardiff University's School of European Studies found a high level of academic approval for online submission and marking of student essays.

Just as in teaching, the UK's academics are not as out of tune with technological progress as they have been portrayed - they are up with world leaders in innovation in its application for research. Just to produce the data that support published research available online opens up the prospects of much more effective international collaboration, as Becky McCall reports on page 4. And optical-fibre technology will make the transfer of large volumes of data at previously undreamt-of rates a reality for heavy users such as physicists and astronomers.

At the bread-and-butter end, the e-Framework project is aimed at streamlining the complex network of commercial and open-source software that universities have built up over the years (page 13). And the power of technology to transform administration should not be left out of the equation. Here, the challenges are great, as Steve Bailey describes on page 6.

Ultimately, universities as communities of human beings must ensure a balance between the efficiencies of technology and the infinite variety of staff and students. New generations of virtual learning environment software will enable lecturers to keep track of student progress and be alerted if it falters.Similar software will allow institutional managers to ensure that their policies - and staff activity - match the university's mission and objectives.

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