In the wars over information technology in the university, I am a neutral. I am neither an

enthusiast nor a critic but a realist. Realists have it hard: they don't have an easy rhetoric they can use, and they don't fit into the conventional "pro versus con" story frame. within which these disputes are narrated. I know people in both camps, though I admit that I find the extremists in the enthusiasts' camp much more insufferable than the extremists in the critics' camp.

In talking to both camps, I have noticed a pattern. Many people on both sides imagine themselves to be a small and embattled minority pushing up against the inertia of established institutions. The enthusiasts, many of them, are individual faculty and researchers who are depressed at the difficulty of persuading their institutions to support large-scale initiatives in this area, and at their colleagues who remain focused on their individual research topics and not on the urgent work of revolutionizing the institution to take advantage of the technology. The critics, many of them, are likewise individual faculty and researchers who see university administrations acting like corporations and entering into partnerships with corporations to create commercialized cyber universities with no regard for the faculty, or for what education really means. Although these views seem like opposites, they come remarkably close to both being right. I want to transcend what they have in common -- a sense of futility that derives from an inefficiency of imagination.

Not everyone fits these two patterns, of course. Some universities do have technology enthusiasts who are running significant programs online, for example degree programs that have students in Singapore. And a remarkable number of critically minded people have had a hand in shaping either the technology or their own institutions' use of it. Andrew Feenberg of San Diego State is an example; he did some the first, if not the very first, experiments with online teaching almost twenty years ago. Mike Cole at UC San Diego has been running classes at multiple UC campuses over video links. There are others. These people are not anti- technology; that is not what "critical" means to them. Rather, they want to ensure that the technology is used in a way that fits with serious ideas about education, so that the technology itself does not drive educational theory or practice.

Although I am friends with many people in this latter camp, my work does not fit into any camp. I do often use technology in interesting ways in my classes, but I am not trying to change the world by doing so. Instead, my work in this area is mainly analytical and normative. I want to sketch a structure of ideas from which we might work in reinventing the university in the wired world. I am not trying to shape technology in a direct way; rather, I want to shape imagination -- imagination not just about technology, but about the larger unit of analysis that includes both the technology itself and the institutions within which it is embedded.

My work is also distinct from the valuable community that conducts research on organizational informatics -- the institutional dynamics, largely cognitive and political in nature, that affect how information technology gets used in particular organizational contexts. These people focus squarely on the political processes that shape information technology: office politics, for example, or the politics that are shaping the development of online publishing, as in Rob Kling's current work at Indiana. Such work is thoroughly needed, but it's not what I'm doing. I'm focused on prescription and imagination -- not "how is it done？" but "how should it be done？". We often think of imagination as an escape from reality, but that's not what I mean. I want to develop a realistic imagination, one that is informed by the real dynamics of institutions, by the real grindings

A．They are unhappy with established institutions.

B．They are detached for individual faculty and researchers.

C．They are self-interested.

D．They embrace the commercialization of the university.