The most obvious advantage of modern Internet-based information technology is in the area of research. Until the last decades of the 20th century, advanced research in higher education usually required expensive and time consuming travel to distant libraries and research centers. With modern connectivity, however, scholars can engage each other and share information on a scale previously unimaginable.
Also significant is the way in which information technology can be used as teaching tools. PowerPoint presentation software illuminates lectures with images, video and audio, and modern Internet-equipped classrooms allow instructors to quickly link to online video sites, even on a tangential discussion, and demonstrate points with powerful video illustrations.
Twenty-first century information technology allows students to quickly and easily access centuries of accumulated wisdom on a scale that their parents, working with library card catalogs and physical texts, could not possibly comprehend. This presents incomparable benefits for exhaustive and comprehensive learning.
On the other hand, what contemporary students gain in breadth and scope of understanding, they often miss in terms of depth and sophistication. The Internet may give students immediate access to every piece of English drama ever composed in the 16th century, but that alone will not provide the student with a significantly deeper understanding of Shakespeare. Quiet, solitary contemplation of texts affords a type of learning that cannot be replaced with a cursory Internet search.
The nature of information technology in higher education has changed radically since the inception of the Internet, more dramatically than the invention of the printing press several centuries ago. Accordingly, the expectations of scholars have also changed. Certain skills that were once highly praised (memorization, for example, or rapid calculation) are now rendered largely redundant by technology. On the other hand, scholars today are expected to learn how to navigate through the overwhelming sea of information currently available, to distinguish relevant from irrelevant, primary from secondary.