We know some of what the future holds. In the 21st century, advanced technologies, constantly changing, will become the ordinary mode of delivering educational programming as well as the primary source of research and information retrieval. A high degree of technological literacy will be required of both students and faculty at virtually every institution of higher learning. Today we are taking a step on the road to that future.

The ACLS grant covered three phases of activity. The first involved visiting other universities now using multimedia-teaching techniques. Dr. A. Nicholas Fargnoli visited Notre Dame, New York University, Hudson Valley Community College, and he had conversations with multimedia specialists at many other institutions. He learned that multimedia is a large and almost borderless area, and it includes sophisticated software programs integrating video, graphics, sound, computing, communications, databases, and other technology applications. He learned something of these various elements, and saw classrooms equipped for the delivery of high-tech instruction.

But the primary lesson that was impressed upon him, he told me, was that all this new technology MUST first benefit the students, or it will not benefit anyone at all. This may seem elementary, but it is a good thing to remind ourselves once in a while that gimmicks and gadgets are lovely fun, but if they do not enhance our ability to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next, they are merely toys.

So our task in using multimedia is not just buying the computers and the necessary software, but first doing the very hard work of figuring out how to use these wonders to make our students wonder. To make the women and men we train here at Molloy able to use these tools to help them understand our world better, and to improve our world wherever possible. To help them to ask "why?" and "how come?" and "what if?" and then to help them find answers to these questions.

The second phase of this grant is today's conference. Here today to help us understand multimedia and to show us its potential in the classroom are several educators and artists who actually utilize these tools to teach. They know that higher education is undergoing a complete transformation, and we have invited them here because Molloy intends to keep up with this changing, challenging world - or, with luck and effort, to put ourselves a few steps out front. This may seem like an impossible goal to some in this room, myself included, but it is the assignment we have set for ourselves. As Herman Melville said about writing Moby-Dick - certainly a formidable task - "Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!"

The third phase of this project is what we have named "The Faculty of the Future." This phase will be ongoing, and we will use the resources provided by the ACLS grant to train a core group of faculty in producing and utilizing multimedia aids to teaching, always with the motto "Performance counts!" We will continue to make the academic needs of our students our top priority. And since the medium is increasingly becoming the message, learning to use these new techniques will certainly help us improve our performance as instructors, and improve our students' performance as learners.

The "Faculty of the Future" project is a part of a larger plan intended to create the Molloy College of the 21st Century. This will include a multimedia learning center, renovation of the chemistry and biology laboratories, and the introduction of "distance learning" to enhance Molloy College's reach into the community. The college education of the next century must be conducted by men and women who will be able to help students take full advantage of the World Wide Web, the Internet, CD-ROM computer-assisted learning, "virtual" laboratories, and other still-developing technologies.

Already here at Molloy we have created a multimedia resources room next to the library in Kellenberg Hall. There professors will be able to consult with computer experts on how to create and produce multimedia lectures and presentations.

Those of us who teach often see our jobs as transferring the knowledge of the past to the people of the future. And that's a valuable, worthy task. But we should always remember that we cannot change the past. We can discuss it, review it, dissect it, and either embrace or reject it - but the past is past. Free will lies only in the present. Change can only be made now to affect tomorrow. It is our hope that we will use this power to build a better, more open, more probing, more adventurous Molloy College.

To paraphrase Walt Kelly's Pogo "We have seen the future, and it is us."