Leader: New media but same message

Colleges and universities sometimes need to be shocked out of their complacency to keep pace with changes in society - particularly among the young. Baroness Greenfield's remarks to the Association of Colleges on the future of learning probably need to be seen in this light because to take them literally requires a leap of faith that few in higher education will be willing to contemplate. We are surely a long way off the point when reading and writing become "almost obsolete". And it is difficult to imagine that learning itself will ever become unnecessary because "all facts are accessible to everyone". It will not be just academics who balk at the concept of learning as no more than the ingestion of "facts", however they are to be determined.

Lady Greenfield is right, however, that further and higher education institutions are having to adapt to a world in which many of their students are more comfortable with computers than books. That is a difficult adjustment to make when the opposite is true of most academics. Education is by no means the only sphere facing this dilemma: newspapers, for example, are embracing other media to meet a similar challenge. But in universities and colleges there is a fine line between sensible process changes that take account of new forms of communication and straightforward dumbing down. No one any longer objects to the use of calculators, for instance, but something valuable is lost from the learning process when both reading and writing tasks are broken down into ever-shorter chunks.

Universities are reacting (at varying speeds) to technological change, using virtual learning environments and other techniques adapted from distance teaching. Some may fail to meet the challenge and eventually go out of business if they cannot offer an experience that is perceived as superior to the increasingly sophisticated alternatives that will be available at home or in the workplace. But, for the moment at least, students still prefer the personal touch: it is no accident that the most prestigious universities tend to have the most generous staffing levels.

Higher education will be making a fatal mistake if it becomes a slave to new technologies, rather than harnessing their power, in the name of creativity. The essential business of training the mind may be done in a different way, but the essential goals remain the same.