Nowhere is the College's Web site having a more profound effect than among alumni. It is bridging geographical, time and financial barriers that otherwise could prevent alumni from keeping in touch regularly. The Alumni Relations site, The Blue Light--which recently won a silver medal from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education--offers daily news "Heard From the Hill" and a section called "Plugged In," where alums can give opinions (Virtual Soapbox), advertise goods and services (Classifieds), share their latest adventures (Fantastic Tales) and exchange notes on fellow Colby people (Who's Out There). They also can look up alumni e-mail addresses, read Colby magazine and browse updates--including photos--about the new residence hall under construction. And a growing number of individual class pages, like the one Tompkins used to announce his daughter's birth, keep classmates corresponding.
	"Alumni Relations tries to bring alumni together in one spot, and the Web provides many ways to do that," Fotiades said. Fotiades says The Blue Light is as good as it is because alumni more or less run it themselves. "To me, the most important thing about The Blue Light is not the number of people using it but its capacity to become a virtual community," he said. The Class of '89 page, for example, he said, becomes a habit, a place to go to "meet" people; a sort of virtual cafe. It hinges together a community of people who celebrate each other's successes, commiserate failures, even share secrets. "It used to be that when you left college you made a decision that `these are my friends, these are the people I will keep in touch with' because it's impossible to write all those letters and make all those phone calls," Fotiades said. "But the Web makes it possible to keep in touch with many more people, including some you might not have known while at college. It is building on old relationships and establishing new ones.
	"In some ways the Web is changing what it means to graduate," he said. "President Cotter always talks at the Baccalaureate service about the fact that Colby is not the end of one's education, that it has equipped us for continued learning. Using the Web, we can make Colby a part of the continuing process of education after people leave Colby." Toward that end, Colby is planning to put selected faculty lectures online, where they could be heard using RealAudio, and, similarly, to make available classes from the Alumni College held every summer on campus. McGlauflin says plans are underway to make class registration possible online, ending the age-old nightmare associated with signing up for courses. Alumni will one day be able to access their records and update them. Students will be able to read and perhaps even download their transcripts. "There are lots of places where we are shuffling papers at an incredible rate," McGlauflin said. "We can eliminate or at least minimize that paper shuffling with electronic systems."
	The College, which this summer is replacing its Web server with a faster, more powerful unit, also is experimenting with intranet systems that provide Web-like services for specific audiences. "For example, our career services office will have a job- listing service that will be available only to our students and alumni," McGlauflin said. Where will all of this lead? Fotiades concedes he has no idea. "The technology is evolving so quickly nobody can predict where it will be in five or even three years," he said. "It's hard to have a vision for the future of our Web site because we just don't know what will be possible. Things are going to happen that we couldn't predict, and there's no way to plan for that." Regardless of what the technology makes possible, Fotiades says, he does not expect the Web to supplant traditional teaching methods. "The Web is a great tool, but it's no substitute for Charlie Bassett standing in a classroom," he said.
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