Mark Taylor: Bringing the Academy into the Electronic Era 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 While Taylor comfortably and skillfully inhabits a world of complex ideas, he is also firmly anchored in the political realities of modern academia, and he has some very strong opinions about it. "We are in the midst of a cultural shift, affecting education along with everything else," he says, "and it is critical that those of us involved with higher education become engaged with the change. We are not doing a very good job of preparing our students for the worlds in which they will live and work." Taylor's respect for his students is apparent in everything he says, and he credits them for many of the developments in his work, including the multi-media approach that has become his trademark. The format was a response to a student "rebellion" at the notion of writing a traditional term paper at the end of the first Cyberscapes course, which examined precisely those technological advances that have the potential to make traditional academic writing obsolete. Now, many of his classes require multimedia projects instead. However, he insists that they provide an analytic treatment of the issues discussed in the class and not technology for its own sake. Collaboration is central to Taylor's teaching, and, in fact, The Réal was co-authored with a student, José Marquez. Marquez did most of the design work, and another student, Noah Peeters, did the programming. While Taylor is far more fluent in technology than many professors, he lets his students take the lead in mastering the technical details. "It's their world more than mine," he says, "but we need to meet the students where they are. We have to be able to engage them, and prepare them to think and write analytically in a new environment."