Proximity learning is a technologically enhanced version of what teacher-scholars have done for centuries in the best Socratic traditions. Proximity learning is not a new concept, so why do we define it anew? We define proximity learning to bring balance to the current debates about the roles of technology in learning, debates that often emphasize distance learning. We hope to bring attention to proximity learning in order to remind us all that there are valuable, new approaches to learning other than those involving learning at a distance.

We are not taking up arms against distance learning. Distance learning is important to many faculty members and institutions whose goals are met well by online curricula. For their goals, distance learning can be even more effective than traditional, location-specific classes. We are convinced, however, that face-to-face learning supplemented with technology will grow in importance to the future of both residential colleges offering the traditional baccalaureate and research institutions focused on research apprenticeships.

We invite you to read more about the assumptions that round out our definition of proximity learning. We believe that we learn from differences and that the best, most engaged, active learning cannot take place without regular face-to-face meetings.

We report here our experiences in teaching at Kenyon College a small, highly-selective, residential college in central Ohio. The Kenyon experience balances discovery, change and tradition. The intellectual and social lives of our students are changed in their four years in this community of scholars that travels pathways of discovery about the world, about each other, about self. We are all learners - faculty and staff as well as students. Kenyon, like many other institutions in the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges, is not about technology or this week's new teaching paradigm. Kenyon is about intellectual and social growth of our learners in a residential setting. We believe that our blending of interpersonal contact with judicious uses of new learning technologies has transformed the classroom experience and enhanced learning.

From 1993 through 1996, with generous funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts' program titled "Strengthening Teaching and Learning" (STL), our faculty, librarians and technologists explored opportunities for information access, communication and collaboration with technology. Our series of "Summer Institutes" for faculty were recognized nationally and set our early adopting faculty on a course of experimentation that produced redesigned and new courses. Throughout the Pew-funded program, and now in our new collaborative efforts with Denison University funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, early adopters of learning technologies were often challenged by other members of the faculty who shared a concern that information technology would replace interpersonal contact between faculty and students. To quote Professor David Marcey, one of the participants in the Institutes and successful adopter of many new approaches to teaching,

"We believe that IT-based distance learning will have many useful applications, but that the core of quality higher education will remain the intensive student-faculty interactions that occur in a physically tangible community of learning in college and university settings. John Seely Brown and Paul Dugid (Change, July/Aug., 1996) have provided cogent arguments for maintaining the physical continuity of learning communities in the digital age. We find that one irony of the emphasis on distance learning is that some of its proponents foresee the use of advanced IT to teach in fundamentally traditional ways, e.g. the "best" lecturers delivering information to virtual classrooms. In contrast, we posit that some of the best uses of IT engage students in novel ways of learning not possible by traditional means, and that this engagement requires student-faculty collaboration, i.e. proximity learning."

Scott E. Siddall Program Director Pew-funded 'STL' Program at Kenyon Mellon-funded Program at Kenyon and Denison