The pressure to do something is great, and it is often exacerbated by arguments of efficiency that have little foundation in fact. For example, suggestions are often made that an investment in educational technology will help handle more students. This point of view may ultimately prevail, but little evidence on this point is currently available. Indeed, it appears that more faculty/staff effort is required to bring interactive technology into students' hands in a meaningful way. Often ignored is the amount of training necessary for a spectrum of novice users.

Another argument often made is that empowering students with interactive technology will somehow lessen pressure on the current (classical) library operation. Presumably, this effect will come about through access to the Internet resources. As currently constituted, the Internet carries information of widely varying quality, ranging from the systematic holdings of many of the fine libraries of the world to outright garbage (from an intellectual point of view). Information on the Internet (other than that from libraries) is often unedited or unorganized to the extent that potential users must employ reasonably sophisticated skills and insights to extract useful information from the abundance of dross. These, of course, are the kinds of skills academe is expected to instill in undergraduates; they are not easily acquired by the "sink or swim" technique, which is often the way students learn to use electronic information systems. Clearly, if this is the only method of instruction we have to offer, students and their parents might be forgiven for questioning the value added by academe to this process. Content-oriented instructors who attempt to use interactive technology to help students learn currently have to spend a considerable amount of time and effort to address these kinds of issues, and, of course, such efforts are usually add-ons in most institutions, where little recognition or encouragement is afforded to the design and development of new courses. Augmenting a course with interactive technology takes considerably more effort than preparing a few new lecture for a standard course, a fact well understood by those who have tried.

Finally, there are the lurking problems associated with success. History tells us that very successful computation center operations ultimately attract more clients than they can handle with their existing equipment, often with the result that the quality of their services begins to degrade. Information technology does not necessarily save time or money, at least in the early phases, and it's not at all obvious that it ever will. Information technology may enable us to do some things we cannot do well in the current environment (e.g., providing students feedback on their work via electronic mail) as well as to do some things much easier or better than is now possible (e.g., accessing information and conducting research). However, such benefits do not automatically translate into economies. For example, with regard to feedback to students, it is not obvious that a teacher in a class, of say, a hundred or more students can actually provide continuous feedback for a full term without assistance of some sort, such as from a teaching assistant. Providing a more efficient and individualized method for student feedback encourages more students to request such assistance, consuming more "teacher time". How different is this from the situation where the teacher is provided with human assistance to conduct the course in one of the more traditional formats? Is the essential difference between the two scenarios simply the intrusion of very expensive hardware (for both the students and the institution involved) and the human infrastructure necessary behind the scenes to keep such systems viable and responsive? Caveat emptor!