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Innovative Uses for Educational Technology Funds?
RumGunner asks: "I
work for a university, and we have a special 'technology' fee that is
charged to students, intended to be used for focus on new technology of
direct benefit to students either in the classroom or related
educational/learning activities. Every semester there is a request for
proposals on how to spend this money, and for the most part these
proposals are fairly lackluster. Since I know there are a lot of .GOV and
.EDU readers on Slashdot, I'm curious to see if anyone has any good
ideas for large (or small) scale applications of new technology for the
benefit of students?"
At my school they invested in more bandwith, first thing you know, somebody rooted the server and put warez on the ftp...
T3's = More Gnutella = More Porn = Happy Comp Science Students
If you have enough money, you can cover the campus with wireless access. This would be good for schools that haven't already wired every dorm and every classroom with CAT5.
1. online course materials via products like Blackboard (grades, tests, syllabi, lecture notes, discussions, etc)
2. Wireless networking (encrypted and/or MAC filtered) in libraries and public places
3. Wireless laptops, either for everyone or for "borrowing" perhaps at the library or other public places.
4. Intelligent routing to prevent the gnutella users from sucking up all the bandwidth. You can do this without entirely blocking the ports, thus letting it happen but preserving the bulk of the bandwidth for other (presumably more legitimate) uses.
5. Internet stations placed in public places for general email and web.
6. IMAP mail (including a Web client) if you currently use POP.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
if your university doesn't have wireless internet access in at least the student common areas, you could look into it. on a larger scale you can use the money to investigate a campus wide wireless setup. this involves some non-obvious costs such as researching building materials that block/channel signals so you can use the buildings as antennas and shields.
Giving every student an account on a Samba server they can reach from anywhere on campus would be good.
It would eliminate the need for floppies and such.
- Nothing is true, everything is permitted
.. to give any direct advice since you didnt specify how large this budget is and what kinda stuff you already have at the university but.. ;)).
:)
Personally i study at a university and things that i would like to have improved are the amounts of terminals around campus to check email from.. Maybe somekinda thin-client/server system that allows you to access the uni-servers to check mail/news (slashdot
Also i doubt that very many universities have enough of they're lecture data on the web - which is really helpful. If the budget is large enough you could hire someone or a few persons to help the lecturers that arent so computer-literate to "digitize" lecture materials and extra material aswell as make good homepages for the courses with links to relevant sites etc. We have those on some of the courses and they are great! More of those would be really neat - preferrably from all courses.
... Just a few kind suggestions - please be gentle
Iowa State has just deployed a wireless network on campus. It's been a joy to use, especially with my iPAQ. Although the academic benefits are debatable, it's certainly nice to be able to check Slashdot and use messenger during a boring lecture.
The network is deployed in common meeting areas and in large lecture halls. I can't wait for spring so I can sit outside the library and check my email.
I'm sure there are some cool things that can be done with a lecture hall full of people with connected laptops...I'm just waiting for someone tell me.
A speech...
How about implimenting a .net/passport (but secure, and encrypted from admin eyes) style of database network. Where students can not only sign up for classes on the computers, which they can currently do in most universities, but can use this database to hold thier entire schedule of anything and everything they want and need to do. This database can be access anywere and everywhere on multiple types of devices, and teachers can input info into a students schedule as reminders in a safe secure way. The possibilies are endless. But as such a system is common in the workplace, getting students used to such a system, and getting computer students to create and admin such a system would provide many after college benifits.
And have an open idea policy, especially amoung the computer students, so that they can impliment any enterprise solutions they can think of. And wireless, definatly wireless.
There's very little "new technology" coming out, scheduled every semester, that benefits students. Five years ago, just having computer labs probably would have been sufficient. These days, when the students all own computers, pagers, and cell phones, all the University can really do is provide connectivity.
There's no new technology that will allow the students to learn more, faster, and have a higher comprehension.
There is, however, scant use of existing technology. Why aren't all syllabi online? Can't past lecture notes and sample tests be posted online? How come half the universities still make students stand in line to sign up for classes? Why do you have to wander around with a slip of paper to drop or add a class? How come so few classes are taught online? I'm not meaning real-time, but a learn-at-your-own-pace? People like me, who have jobs and families and no good University nearby, want to take extra classes, and have the money, but can't find anyplace reputable to offer the courses.
There's little innovation because most people don't get what to do with it, or they aren't willing to spend the time to do it. I know of 3 dozen professors who received grants to make their classes available online, and in the end, all they had was about 20 pages of static HTML pages, which were never updated, became stale, and then were removed from being online when the web server was upgraded.
I'll end this with the worst funding request I ever read (and you're going to read it all):
"Here's a list of the things we want. (You don't need anything more than this, do you?)"
Attached was an excel spreadsheet with items and prices.
Well I'd be tempted to say that whatever you do don't hire MCSEs, THEIR time should be worth nothing.
1.) better security software
... at least that's what my damn school spent it on...
2.) PDA's for kids
3.) nicer mousepads
4.) novelty-colored serial cables
5.) typing programs with gnomes
Invest money in fast linux workstations... No university I have visited has linux workstations. They're all Sun Solaris on Sun hardware, or something similar. Go for Athlon with Red Hat or something, I'd say...
you can't beat this: stop charging them the tech fee. i paid it all four years and got nothing but crappy half-implemented services like "blackboard" (an assignment/notice/expensive software that only CS professors were willing to use/schedule web application). here's my advice, if you don't know what you're charging a fee for -- don't charge it!!! how would you like a government-gizmo-thingy-tax?
This may be a little off-topic but should a university really pay a 'technology' fee on top of their original fee's - as I go to a British university ( and a very good one at that ) I'm used to complaining about the £1075 pounds a year I pay for fee's. Students should have resources needed for a course provided to them.
Oh if you had to spend it a cluster of machines dedicated to Operation Flashpoint would be good.
I'm one of 5 student members on the final Tech Fee committee at my university (SPSU). One of the problems we've run into isn't the lack of good ideas, but the lack of faculty/staff on the lower committees that shoot down some good ideas before we on the upper committee get to vote on them. Granted, I've seen some frivolous proposals for stuff that we really don't need, and I would vote them down in order to get more long-term projects funded that will benefit more students. For example, it took us 2 meetings just to decide whether or not to fund a 3D printer for rapid prototyping in the MET dept. It was a large ticket item, but it would make things so much easier for the students to make a quick prototype instead of the time-consuming milling of a real part.
The biggest ideas that I see coming up this year are requests for wireless access in student common areas, and increased funding for lab staff (so we can keep the brand new labs open longer). Hopefully this year we'll see the students submit more proposals, as the most we commonly see are requests from faculty and staff. (We divide the available funds into thirds, for IT, Academics, and Students--and the students section always comes up short with proposals.)
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
If you make the pipe bigger, they will fill it.
All a college student wants is more bandwidth to download thier divx, mp3's, and warez. So do the right choice and invest in some dark fiber links!
Your university is taking money from its students and having trouble figuring out what to do with it. The answer is simple. Give the money back to the students.
Wow.
I know that this will probably be a completely foreign idea for anyone in education or government, but why not give the money back?
If you have to ask on Slashdot on how you should spend the money then I can only imagine one of two situations. Either your technology infrastructure has everything you need out of it, or you/your staff are unable to see what it needs and you should find jobs you are more suited to.
If it is the former, then why not refund the money back to the students who paid it? As a current taxpayer and recent student I am sick and tired of the waste of my money that occurs in the system by people spending money whimsically on unneeded expenditures. I'm sure those of your students that are working hard to pay their way through school would agree with me.
I can only speak from a U.S.A. perspective, but schools and government both seem to suffer under the idea that they ought to spend our money not because they need it, but because they can. The thought that you need to look for blue sky projects to spend the money on just because you have it sickens me.
Example: My college needed an emulator to teach assembly language to students, and I SOOO wanted them to have an undergrad build one and open source it.
PFwahh!! Debian supports more than just Linux. You can even run it on NetBSD or The HURD. Not that they are very stable now already, but I can get rid of Linux soon, I hope.
Hint: 2.4.15-greased-turkey. Don't mod me down for one of Linus' brown paper bag bugs..
After all, the money does come from them. Try putting up feedback pages on your website and see what areas the students feel are lacking in your IT department.
Secondly, do research on whatever you decide to do, and then discuss it with the students in some way. My school attempted to implement a one laptop for every person policy-- until they announced it to the students. The students protested so loudly that the plan has since been put on the backburner, indefinately.
Let's assume that the fee is setup like ours is here: $100/semester.
Now, I'm sure a large school could get a deal with dell/compaq/hp for say $800 - 4x$200. If the student leaves early, they either turn their laptop in or they pay the rest for it. Otherwise, it's theirs.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
I think it's important to remember that most students aren't interested in the cutting edge. They want stuff which just works. (This is why people use Windows and Macs.) Sure, you could give students a palm-sized Wifi-enabled device but then what? Too few students are nerdy enough to use it. Heck, a significant percentage of them don't even own their own computer and are very content to type their semiotics papers at a nearly computer cluster.
Perhaps a better use of the tech money would be something like recording lectures and posting them in a popular streaming-media format for later playing. This would be immediately accessible to everyone, not just those students who want to screw with SSIDs.
The point is this:
BEN
i think that there's one cheap thing that can be given to all p2 laptops w/ wireless pcmcia running gnu/linux that is my suggestion
I experiment here. Why should you decide at all? Give them a TWiki web (wiki web), and see what they do with it. The idea, I take it, is to give them room to take chances, to explore and to make mistakes.
My .edu tried deploying classes with eBooks. No buy-the-book-instead option, eBook only, same price as print, chock full of DRM. Very costly experiment for us, and students are livid.
Pardon the anonymous post. I like my school, and would hate to see this one incomprehensible decision reflect poorly on them.
Obviously if you are charging students a tech. fee and you don't have a plan for all the money you have charged too much. consider lowering the fee. I find that some technology actually hinders education. It is often times a distraction. I go to the liabrary, there are terminals there, I go to the student center, there are terminals there... You can't get away from it. People should be able to interact with out technology, teachers shouldn't use powerpoint (it makes boring presentations ever worse), putting course information on the web is a painful attrocity (especially if everyone has to use it and the system is not powerful enough). Technology is not always enough to make a school a better place.
Check out the mailing lists at SchoolForge and SEUL/Edu to get in touch with a group of educators (and other interested parties) who are very familiar with open source educational technologies. They will be able to discuss any options you have in depth (At least more than a slashdot forum discussion :)
...than put up with my status quo. Allow me to outline it briefly:
- The school board turned down a request for a $100 budget allocation in order to buy more computer paper by the head of our school's computing department. Now, if you want to print anything, you need to bring your own paper.
- All computers in the school share a single ISDN line. At peak times, i.e. the only times that we're allowed to be in the media center, we get a throughput of about 5 bytes per second.
- Except for a few iMacs that were donated last year, all the computers are 486s with 8mb of memory, running win95.
- The school was awarded $100 per student for being an "A" school. There was a referendum among the faculty as to whether to spend 90% on bonuses and 10% on technology, or 100% on bonuses. I'll leave it to you to guess how that turned out.
Basically, at the high school level, technology is essentially a zero budget operation. I would MUCH rather pay an annual fee for the right to use the computers than put up with what we have now.
Online class availability seems to depend on your major. As far as I can see, private business schools (even non-profit) are pretty good about this, and seem to assume that their students are working. Public schools aren't like this, and my private technical university isn't like that.
My wife's an accounting major at Davenport University, and she has plenty of online classes available. One of my coworkers is an IT major at the same school, and hasn't gone to a classroom for two years. I, however, am a CS major at Lawrence Tech. U., and it appears that the only class I could take online is "Technical and Professional Communications", which is required for all students. Even for that class, though, you still have to show up four times for presentations.
I think Eric (the IT major) still has to go to campus occasionally for administrative stuff, but otherwise he might as well be taking the classes from Hong Kong.
At colleges and universities, hardware has a clear purpose: students need to do research and write papers. There's a very high demand for that, even if technology isn't playing a direct role in education. And even there, it's often the case that hardware-focused programs waste money.
But in K-12 education, this problem is huge. It's one of the many bitter jokes behind Microsoft's school donation proposal: you can't just plop a lot of hardware in the middle of a school and expect magic.
Guess what? Computers do not magically make learning happen. Students aren't going to get anything out of computers unless either (1) they have an engaged, tech-savvy teacher who finds ways to use computers effectively as a teaching tool, or (2) they have the opportunity to experiment on their own, without having the computers locked off, crippled, or kept off limits for unstructured learning. For hardware to be useful, students need available expertise and, above all, access.
So, I'd suggest spending tech dollars on people. I'm thinking mostly of K-12 here:
Dude, you reek heavily with the stench of stupidity...
Take the money and invest it in growth stocks.
After a few years, start moving the money into
income stocks. Use the income from the stocks
to fund the projects, and stop charging the fee.
Use it to create the "CowboyNeal Esteemed Professorship"
. . .and I would assume likewise for most universities that provide comupting resources to students.
.02. . .
Every quarter students here are charged a 'Student Technology Fee' on their tuition bill. This money is then dispensed by a committee of students, staff, and faculty towards educational technology projects.
Most of the money has gone towards building some excellent general-access computing labs for students. Our school has a glut of computers for student use--compared to others I've visited, there are no time limits, printing is cheap, and despite a growth in student body size most days you can come into the library and sit down at a computer.
In addition, there have been some 'questionable' purchases, in that exhorbitant amounts of cash have been funnelled into machines I wouldn't think are worth it. Examples are buying many of the mac g4 cubes instead of regular macs, along with those huge LCD displays. Don't get me wrong--I love the displays, but at the same time each one is the equivalent of 4 computers.
So in sum, if you want to spend student money on educational techology, BUILD MORE LABS! Spend the money the most efficient way possible in order to server the most students effectively. If your school has any need or projected need at all for more computing seats, give those your first priority. Going from a school where the labs were too small to the one I'm currently at demonstrated just how important--and NICE--it is to have close to enough seats to serve the student body.
Just my
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
As a student at a mid sized school. The technology fee has turned into a small slush fund. I personaly send a proposal and it was later denyed. I think a WAN for on campus and a limited area of off campus housing would give better access and allow alot of students to use the resources from many access points.
-Eyempack
It's a bit hard to make suggestions without knowing what your budget is and what you already have, but I'll give it a shot.
Other posters have suggested a file server so that people can access their files from anywhere in the university. I'd extend this by adding an automated backup and recovery system.
Make your daily/weekly/monthly backups as you normally would, but store the backups in a random-access form. Set up a web interface to allow people to browse the backed-up copies of their files and retrieve them.
It might sound like a small thing, but I've found many times that I'd like to look at an old version of a file, and I'm sure other students are no different; the point isn't so much to provide a backup service as it is to provide a file rollback service.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Let me get this straight. You charge them a "technology fee" *first* and then dedice what get's done with it?
Pedro Côrte-Real.
You can get one from here as well as other places.
Put it online, do various things to encourage each department to use it, put some of your own content on it, make sure students know about it and so on. One of the first things to use it for is to start a discussion for feedback about how the campus can be improved.
For more on what a wiki is, try The Portland Repository. I would explain in detail, but after you go through the introductory pages there, anything that I could say would be redundant.
Put those dollars to use; bootstrap adoption of AbiWord or Gnome across the university; have students turn in HTML instead of Microsoft Word DOC format.
- Anonycous Moward
While it is probably more oriented towards graduate students and faculty, online journals directly linked to our libraries search pages were a great addition. IEEE and physics journals tend to be used by a large number of students and might be a place to start.
At USB, our file serving is powered by SneakerNet (http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?snea kernet).
- Nothing is true, everything is permitted
My campus has gone completely wireless and for students with laptops (like myself) it's awesome.
The nature of the proposals wasn't explicitly stated in the question posted, but our University has a similar proposal-based system through the "Center for Instructional Technology." I am on a steering committee that deals with the proposals and money expenditures.
The proposals are to be entertained from faculty, students, and teaching assistants; they are looking for new and innovative ways to use technology to promote learning. The budgets in question are usually a few thousand dollars per proposal.
For instance, say a biology professor has an idea to use a wireless network and bunch of PDAs to use out "in the field". Each plant in a greenhouse or out in a field has an identifier next to it; as students walk around the field they can learn about any plant they find interesting by using their PDA to immediately research it over the wireless network, either querying a remote database or accessing web pages.
Remove the bandwith caps from the resident networks.
My school (Oregon Tech) has a similar fee that we pay, but it isn't applied to innovations or research of new technologies, but rather improving the existing infastructure. Since it started we went from unwired dorms to 10Mb. Some wireless beta programs were added, and best of all we got our own T1 for student access. (previously it was just dial up in the dorms. Ten modems for 300+ people) None of these things were very impressive, (maybe even lackluster) but they helped improve campus life 100%
Driving backwards on the highway of life
Realdolls for all geek freshmen so they don't end up with herpes from the slutty art students on their time. They could even be made into robots and I'm sure in the future they could be used to shoot napalm out of those blowjob lips at anyone who may try to harm the poor geek freshmen.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Digressing a little bit, is there really a need to implement new technology? At least from what I've caught in the news, most of the stuff coming out these days are either upgrades to software schools should have anyways, or useless tacky crap (palm pilot update) that really is more suited for individual fetish than education as a whole. Web pages never being updated, annoying phones going off in class, perhaps money would be better spent showing people how to use the tools they already have instead of bringing in a truckload of more problems.
Why? Not just because you might miss a class, but also for reference after the event.
Why MP3 rather than video?
Simple: cost. You could take a tiny slice of the tech budget and wire every auditorium and classroom for sound, and serving the files is no big deal (96KBMP for voice sounds like a CD).
The problem which this leaves is blackboards / whiteboards. I'd suggest two possible solutions, in keeping with this low-tech approach.
1> Webcams which take a picture of the board every five or ten seconds.
(Pros: cool, cons: more complex, sync. with audio a problem).
2> One of those funky systems which record where your pen is on the whiteboard and produce gifs from that data.
Either solution is expensive, relative to sound, however, so mebbe the right thing to do is just to skip it.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
If you can't come up with anything, the either refund the money to students, or save it up for a really expensive project. Don't squander it on Bullshit.
Being in university myself, I'd like to see a few things changed at our school.
The first would be to hire someone full time that runs the web servers. I almost failed exams because they were down 4 of 5 days, and I needed some information from them. Its nice that they want to let students run the point and click windows environment, but it just isn't stable enough for their use.
The 2nd thing I'd love to see is more materials for the profs to use. Many will occassionally bring in their 486 notebooks and try to show us something with a projector from it. Of course they crash, and are awfully slow. All the content is also on their harddrive, and they have no wireless access. Each prof should be able to have a wireless network computer with them, and the projector to go along with it. Overheads are way outdated for the kind of applications engineering students use.
Of course, the dream is for the school to have notebooks for students. Our tution price is huge compared to the cost, and when we factor in our textbooks it might even be more benefical and cheaper to have just laptops for everyone. Many of our profs just wish everyone in class could have one, as it would really allow us to do things right.
Here's a thought. Ask the students what they think their money should be spent on. :-)
Spending $ on Tech fees burns me! Just so a bunch of conformists can have a pool of cash to burn on MS seats and Web course in a box crapola- but at least tech fees conceivably benefit *all* students- at least those interested in information- beats paying tithe to the black student union - if you're not black and the baptist student league if you're not baptist. My univ has over a dozen official clubs just for "African Americans" to promote "diversity" (not to mention the ad hoc ones that get $ for pizza parties- Course no one has an answer to the fact that a club, if monocultural or monochromatic HAS NO DIVERSITY! But it keeps the MaoMaoing at a minimum. - Don't get me started on the 5 92%+ black universities I gotta pay for w/ my taxes here in VA. (one of which just got busted for racial discrimination against their profs! ha!)
Seriously tho, spend the cash on spell/grammar check programs for these morons who just can't get the difference between their/there.
I've worked in IT at the Univ Oklahoma and now a small private college. Here's my experience and advice:
Don't charge a technology fee, it just gives students one more thing to whine about. IT should be driven by an institutional needs basis so you can get the biggest bang for your buck. Those typically are more network storage space, more mail server space, online enrollment/course content, and reliable connections.
Wireless: Us tech geeks like to shout "wireless" as the solution to everything, but hardly anyone at the Univ Oklahoma used the wireless. Students would rather have a fast wired connection. If their dorms are not switched ethernet, you need to implement switching ASAP.
Email: Give everyone decent mail storage and access via a web client such as the free squirrel mail app (squirrelmail.org)
Network storage: We just installed a new raid array on our OSX servers which will give each student 100MB. Our next step is to get Samba and FTP up and running on those to allow access anywhere.
Online enrollment/course content: If your only new IT development is online enrollment, the students will appreciate you. My recommendation is that those developing this MUST get the tech support folks involved. Oklahoma didn't get the helpdesk people involved in the planning/development stages of their initial rollout. That resulted in thousands of questions that could have been negated by user-friendly prompts and error messages.
Off-campus connections: Don't even go there. It will be a huge waste of helpdesk resources and endless whining. No educational institution can hope to be a good dialup ISP, so don't try. Let those off-campus find a local provider. If you have a technology fee, off-campus users will EXPECT a free dialup. One more reason to get rid of the technology fee.
Better than charging a bus fee and then deciding what to do with it.
Administration: Buses? We already had money for buses, we just got the students to vote to give us MORE bus money, so now we have extra. Time to build some center that less than 1% of the campus will be able to access.
I voted no, but I was unusually informed. Thank you Texas A&M. Now we all are forced to pay for a bus pass (in essence), but you don't print them because our IDs now double as bus passes. More money in, less money spent, oops too much, use for something the students wouldn't have voted for. Yay!
Yes, get the money first, figure out what you want after it's all counted.
When I was part of the executive, the Engineering Students' Society at my university brought in a similar program called the EUEF (Engineering Undergraduate Equipment Fund.) $25(CDN) a semester for every undergraduate engineering student. It's worked pretty well. Take a look at http://www.ess.ualberta.ca/services/euef.php.
They've got a list of everywhere the money has gone since it was brought in. You might get some ideas there.
-- Were am I going? And why am I in this handbasket?
You can put the money in on-line education.
What do you need (all of the following elements have to be fullfilled):
-Support from teaching staff: they must want it.
-Software to run this (you can buy it, create it yourself or use open source software).
-You need support for the software
-You need advice about creating on-line courses (You could just put the syllabus on-line, but then you're not creating on-line courses).
-You need someone who will keep the courses up to date.
-You need someone who will answer questions relating to the on-line courses.
The combination of all te preceding elements are quite costly if you are serious about it.
But then again you could simplify stuff a lot and just offer a combination of a forum / a file sharing environment/ e-mail listing.
Actually here we actually have a fund in the Faculty of Science that was created a bit for that, except that students run all of it (disclaimer, I've been part of that group for about 3 years). The main fund is to put computers available in the hallways for students to use. We have about 75 right now, which will increase by about 20 soon. But we've been doing a few other interesting projects: Lectures Online, we record lectures from a few auditoriums from the sound system and make them available online. We have linux recorders there that record at the speciific classes and them upload the Real audio files to the webserver. So there's zero maintenance involved, and since we're using old machines, no harware cost either. We've also been helping some profs to put their lectures in PowerPoint format. We're actually recording some of them. Those require more manpower and hardware, but you can actually have both the visuals and the audio at the same time! It's actually pretty funny that the University usually picks up our projects pretty quickly and copy them as their own. At least we get them moving a bit, else they might miss the boat completely on some of those. If you're curious about some of the others thigns that we're doing, feel free to contact me. François
I work for a university, and we have a special 'technology' fee that is charged to students, intended to be used for focus on new technology of direct benefit to students either in the classroom or related educational/learning activities.
I work for one too. We also charge a technology fee. It goes straight into the general fund, never to be seen by the IT department.
This seems pretty common -- most of the colleges I've heard of use the tech fee as something to raise rather than tuition. There's lot of those; Death of a Thousand Cuts to keep the paper tuition low.
--saint
While I don't agree with colleting fees from students when you have no clear goals in mind with the money, I do have one suggestion. The school I attend has a very good infrastructure and lots of software at the proffesors disposal to allow students to access grades, assignments, homework, or whatever online (such as the blackboard software). However this software seems to be rarely used due to the fact that some professors simply have no idea how to use it. Professors from nontechnical departments such as the English department simply just don't get it because they have never been properly shown how to use it. The software was probably purchased using technology fees from previous years but it is now worthless because no one uses it to it's fullest potential if they use it at all.
What is the point of constantly spending money to buy software and hardware that no one will know how to use. Take some time and set up seminars on how to better use the existing infrastructure. Educate the proffesors on how to make the best use of the technology at their disposal.
I am all for spending money to upgrade and expand the technology used on campus, but make sure people know how to use it and will use it before adding more unused resources.
However the technology the students own at home, will be geared towards being easy to use, and won`t require much, if any, learning to use. If all someone does is click on quake.exe, play the game, crash, reboot, click quake.exe etc etc, they will never actually learn anything usefull. It`s the job of education to teach people that there is more to computing than just playing games, and to show them how to correct things which are wrong, And this can more easily be achieved in a lab environment, where the university has the resources, such as multiple hardware architectures and a wide range of very different software. Afterall, if you teach someone to look for the options they need, rather than showing them exactly where a particular system keeps those options, they will be much more able to adapt to differing software/hardware environments.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
spend the money upgrading all the machines to the latest version of windows! i think xp only costs $500 per license, but you could probably still exaust all your funds by paying microsoft.
my friends are really right. microsoft just "get's the job done." i mean really, if we were installing linux, we'd still have truckloads of money unspent. waste is the silent killer...
Strong projects using existing technology will exploit the network's ability to deliver to, and collect from, anywhere. For instance, your older faculty in archaeology, Classics, Religious Studies, etc. probably have thousands of excellent slides under their own copyright that they really hope will not disappear after they retire. A local, web-based catalogue of these would be a treasure-trove to new faculty and might even be a selling point in the increasingly competitive market for academics.
As John Holt said, learning is not the product of teaching -- it is the product of the activity of the learner. So what do you want your students to do? The best uses of technology for students are as a tool performing these activites, ideally using the capabilities of technology to support networked collaboration. What are these activities? In biology they include performing observations (digital cameras), data acquisition (A2D boards), analyzing data (spreadsheets, graphing, pspp, etc), and presenting results (word processing, presentation tools, VNC to share screens and project results). There is also a specialized role for technology as a problem-solving environment (coupling a modelled environment with a set of built-in tools for analysis).
As I've written before, the biggest danger is the indescriminate use of technology to just do what was done before but now with technology. Most of the extant course management tools (WebCT, Blackboard, etc) have this focus. For more innovative approaches, check out lon-capa (lon-capa.org) or learnloop (learnloop.org).
We had unrestricted 100 megabit access to our OC-3 pipe in the dorms. I was told that two years after installing ethernet in the dorms our bandwidth bill had become 16 times greater than it was before dorm ethernet. The cost the University was enormous. Instead of blocking ports, which is generally frowned upon by the IT department (hey, they like P2P too!) they decided to implement "bandwidth shaping" which would throttle the bandwidth when excessive outgoing tranfer was detected, and would bring itself back up once the excessive usage stopped. I'm not sure how they're doing it but it was a huge disaster at the beginning (people were getting shut off completely). It seems to be working now I guess and I haven't noticed any annoyances, but I'm on a cable modem and would probably be unaffected anyway.
I do a ton of downloading and I would say around 80-90% of it is legitimate (I transfer a lot of legal ISOs), so I'm glad I haven't been affected.
I went to OSU. Whenever this question was posed to the students, one of the biggest requests always involved mice in the labs. Most computer labs on campus used old mice and had no mouse pads. Every mouse was perpetually in need of cleaning. Before you go out and spend lots of money on anything innovative, make sure all the basic stuff works well... and if you can, get Optical Mice so no one ever has to clean another lab rat again.
Other suggestions:
Improve Documentation: One of the biggest questions at CS-OSU was, "How do I get an X session?"
Improve network infrastructure: This can always be improved.
Improve WebCT/remote learning: WebCT/Remote learning tools typically need improvement. Usually, the biggest problem is not the software but the Teachers who are unfamiliar with it but required to teach course through it. Student aids for these teachers are not always adequate.
Wireless: This may be a bit much, but the students would love it if you could get it working.
Subsidized/Discounted Software: At OSU we had the Buckeye Bundle. It included every MS product (any OS, any Office, Studio) for $100. We also had a Software to Go website where we could download some stuff like SSH for free. This was very popular with me and my friends.
The thing that angered me when I first got to my University was that every rich student's parents seem to buy them a brand new $2000 laptop (not to mention the latest, most wastingest, trendy SUV, but that's another rant) which they only ever used for music and porn, while I was barely able to run netscape on my ancient box and going half-blind from a fuzzy, dying monitor (Imagine getting a headache every time you tried to study- not very encouraging). Seeming to have the least capable machine in the dorms was embarrassing enough, but the fact that I'm doing CS made it even worse.
:) ) can get one. Also, public labs don't cut it, as I routinely need to be a sudoer or administrator, and I break my box all the time trying out bizarre things. Can't really do that in a public lab.
I don't think any school should buy machines for every incoming student, but some sort of program tied into the financial aid office whereby us less-than-priviliged kids (and especially those of us who really need a decent machine, like computer scientists
Also my school built something called the Wildnet- which is also a nifty idea.
In regards to your focus on the inside of the classroom - you might be interested in a company called Smart. I've purchased and installed two of thier boards now and they're a big hit. They're a step beyond a computer with a projector. It not only allows educators to stand up in front of the projected computer screen and actually control the computer by touching it, it also allows them to put any student workstation up on the projector as well, such as for a class critique of student work.
I went out of my way to arrange training for the faculty who would be teaching in these labs. Most of them showed up, a few still don't get it. But for the board is used every single day, that much I know.
I think you mentioned Blackboard, too. We've been using it also and it's been great for us. We periodically arrange for 2-hour how-to sessions for faculty. Adoption of the system has positively exploded. Naturally there are plenty of faculty who will never use it, but as you say the students pressure them and we provide the training...so in the end more and more come to use it.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
I currently work at a research university, and one of the foremosts issues we face is not in a number of useful tools and projects which promote research and education, but how to get these tools and systems to interoperate. It would be great if a student could log in with their student ID, and access any of the tools and services that might be available to them. These might be electronic reserves, their class registration, their course's website, the campus bookstore (for ordering books), a central file storage area particular to that student, etc. I'm not aware of any university which has seemless integration of learning and research tools.
"What we have here, is a failure to communicate." - Cool Hand Luke
Prostitutes. Ones with great big breasts and no hep-B!
You have funding, but you can spend it wisely by trying out href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/manhattan/"& gt;Manhattan Virtual Classroom available for FREE at SourceForge. Makes it easy for prof's to post lectures, notes etc. by simply attaching docs, not coding them into html. Has very low hardware requirements an is extremely stable.
Our Uni has network shares. We started with 20MB quotas which was rediculous because it was almost maxed out by IE/Netscape/roaming profiles, Eudora data files, and the like. The quota is now at 50MB and it seems to be a much better amount. This was paid for with the student technology fee.
We use Northern's quota server to implement quota on Dell Windows 2000 Servers. However, Quota Server seems to buckle under the pressue with 5000 students per box. We have a lot of problems with quota being screwed up. I think around 3000 people per box is more of a sweet spot for this particular product. We have under 1500 staff/faculty per box and it has very few problems.
Build an integrated account system for the various OS's that you have around campus. This ends up being a LOT more than spending money, although money is part of it. It's spending Campus political clout and providing a unified service to the students. One account, one authorization, no matter where you're going or what you need.
I am sure that MS products would not qualify the
"new technology" requrement. Better to invest in open source, alternative OS, and SUN hardware.
Solaris is free for the asking (under 8 cpus).
At Rock Valley College in Rockford Illinios they have something called EdNet. Simply put it's a graphical BBS that can be accessed via the web or through computers on campus. When you sign up for a class there you automatically receive an EdNet account. The system seems to work well for Rock Valley and the few other schools that I've heard use it. It doesn't necassarly have to be EdNet but this is kind of a system is interesting because the teachers can create there own "Room" for there classes. Within these rooms you can post comments or questions, get a chat going with another student, or just get your homework assignment. I'm not sure were one would go to get info about EdNet specifically but I'm sure a search in google will reveal something.
There is nothing more important than providing a platform for University and politicians to come together to pat each other on the back and show off. Therefore, all proposals must meet this primary objective. If it fills a room up, all the better.
Therefore, Weave's the good and the bad list for spending ed tech money.
THE BAD
THE GOOD
I hope this helps. p.s. This is just a theoretical exercise. My employer is, of course, far more enlightened on these matters...
If you can't figure out what to do with the money, then why are you collecting it?? I swear, you liberals are just nuts .. Let the students keep THEIR money, and spend it truly useful things, like tuition and books.
-B
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
What we have in my school is a student organization that basically volunteers their time to make nice things for the campus community with funding coming directly from the school. With that money we maintain a library of computer books and a few student operated servers that people who know what they're doing can mess with and students can request web space on. (In our case the student servers have much better support for mySQL, PHP, etc. and much better reliability than the school ones) The problem we have, though, with students executing the plans is that we have tons more ideas (and the money) but not many people actually work on them.
read the bunni comic
My first year of college, I went to a big name engineering school in Milwaukee where all of the students were provided with laptops with an extensive software package. A lot of the students complained about the price of the machines (around $3000 for an Armada K62-300 three years ago), but no one complained when it came time to type up papers or compile test code. Also, the infared capable printing stations were nice for those students that did not have their own printers.
As for wireless networking, I don't think it is really necessary on a campus, especially if the school does not provide/force laptop ownership. However as an alternative, I think study lounges, libraries, etc..., should be wired for access to the campus network / the internet.
Loaner laptops would be a good idea if not for human nature. I've been to schools where they loaned out word-processors and even those were abused and damaged. I think that truly functional laptops would be all the worse.
The university I attend now simply blocks the ports for napster, gnutella, etc.. which annoys me a little, but is perfectly understandable.
My school also has email/web terminals, which are never vacant, set up in the hallways of the student union.
As for IMAP/POP, I don't think it matters much to the end user as they both require more setup than the kids want to put forth. Most people on campus don't use the campus email that is provided free of charge. They have hotmail accounts or the like. If the school provided a web interface to the email system, it would probably find more use.
Basically, as much as I don't like to say it, anything that makes the system easier to use for the students is a worthwhile cause. Stupid proof terminals in the student union and full access computers in the privileged labs seems to be a system that works well.
I found out about this neat new tech just recently. You take a tree, shread it to ribbons. Then mash it with some chemicals, and pull it out flat.
Then take some berries or blood. Dip a pointy stick into it, and scratch out the same characters that come up onto your screen when you use a keyboard.
The technology is amazing. It is 100% portable, and usable without batteries or electricity of any kind (although using at night does require an accessory light). In addition, they never, ever, ever become obsolete. If I understand correctly, there are no licenses, so when finished, you can hand the treepulp with blood scratchings to the next set of students.
Now, it is somewhat fragile, and is flammable. But it survives being dropped off of a desk MUCH better than a laptop. Even better than those toughbooks.
The user interface is pure simplicity. No keyboard or mouse. You simply take a stack of this treepulp, and place it in sequential order. Then physically move the 'pages' back and forth to get to the desired 'page'.
And, here is the truly insane part: they are cheap. For the same $899 that you may spend on a computer that will be destroyed and obsolete in a few years, you can literally buy thousands of these treepulp stacks.
The support costs are almost zero. You need a box or 'treepulp shelf' to store them on, and you need some climate control (not as rigorous as that needed for computers, BTW), but that is it. No network admin, no support contracts, no licensing agreements.
I know it sounds like this must be vaporware, but I have actually seen them for sale in stores. Maybe it is just an east coast thing, but I have a feeling that these will really take off.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
So you took hard-earned money from the students and you're so clueless you have to come to slashdot to find out how to spend it? I am outraged that fools like you are entrusted with the education of students.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
But not so many .NET users...
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
How disappointing. I was really hoping to learn something interesting from this thread. Every University (probably true in the private sector as well) is obsessed with mindless tech expenditures. They just bought the secretaries in my dept. 17 inch flat screen monitors. I can't possibly think of a reason why.
Anyway--the basic problem with technology in Universities as I see it--is that the funds are used to make life more convenient for students rather than for educational purposes. This means a more streamlined administration but no advance in education itself. This is because students think that the money should be spent on tangible benefits for them (e.g. all of the silly "give it back to the students" advice above.) And the tech people are in love with tech for tech's sake rather than for educational purposes. Sure wireless is nice for probably 5% of the students, but education can and will occur in the total absence of wireless network access (actually probably wireless will only hinder education--just what we need another freakin' distraction for the MTV attention span of the modern undergraduate.)
What's the solution? Tech for the faculty! Smart Classrooms--additional training to develop technology enhanced instruction for the faculty. Reduced teaching loads for faculty to integrate technology into their courses (Time was when all you had to do to teach was write some lectures and deliver them. Now the lectures have to "entertaining" for the students as well. If we add technology to the classroom, now the faculty have to get training in writing web-pages, writing powerpoint presentations, designing multimedia content for the classroom.) All faculty members should have several computer systems (rather than one every 5 years or so). A laptop for use in classroom and at home. An office computer. Plenty of space of servers etc..--blackboard software or equivalent. multiple email accounts etc.. Support services in the university for doing time-consuming activies (scanning documents etc.)
Not going to happen however, because students are consumers and investing in the long term human infrastructure of the University gets much less notice than flashy buzz-words like "wireless" and is less easily justified to the myopic administrators and immature students who dominate the discussions.
plug
You collect the money without a purpose for it? How about you REFUND it and go back and plan a budget. I'm sure the students there appreciate knowing you have no clue.
I go to a relatively small school in North Carolina... There are not a lot of geeks here, but the use of technology here is pretty darned good.
;)
1. Wireless in many of the buildings
2. Loaner laptops in the library
3. A whole lot of classrooms have LCD projectors
mostly used for powerpoint, but still nice.
4. POP/IMAP and Web based email (through Campus
Pipeline) IMHO web mail sucks nuts, and Campus
Pipeline is web based, it is prone to crashes
and is generally slow.
5. Ethernet in all dorms, ~DSL speeds.
6. A lot of computer labs with pretty good
computers, and good hours, we have only 1 24
hour lab though.
I have a few complaints about the school though.
1. More bandwidth damnit.
2. More bandwidth damnit.
3. Don't restrict my access, I want to be able to
run a Unreal Tournament server.
4. The network goes down to much, if this were a
commercial environment most all of our network
admins would be fired.
5. Get rid of the damned VAX servers, get some
good UNIX servers.
6. Tech support people need paid more. (yup I work
for tech support hehe)
7. More bandwidth damnit
Something that I think would be beneficial would be some type of caching system for frequently downloaded files would be a good thing.
Instead of blocking all incoming ports, give us
a upload cap.
Get rid of Campus Pipeline... just because it sucks.
like i said, nt
Quake servers.
... it is used to pay software licenses. That's right, Word on every computer. Why they don't set up a kde box with normal office apps is beyond me. Oh, wait, it's because microsoft donated most of the equipment and now it would be too much of a hassle to switch.
(www.washington.edu)
give everyone pop accunts, online storage, file sharing, and other webservices like document convesion or instant message (run a private Jabber server?)
My school offers a distance ed. program based on technology.
You can check it out here.
Anyway, this is a big deal to me. I'm 28, a parent, and I'm married. It would be very hard on me and my family to go back to school now. With this program I'm able to get a comp sci master's degree without taking away from my income or family time (I do the work after my two year old goes to bed.)
In addition to that, on campus students are able to make up classes or watch critical sections twice. The school makes money on VBEE (video based engineering education) students even though they are charged less because they don't use the same assets. They make even more money when they reuse the lectures. (A lecture is good for about 18 months in comp sci.)
Anyway, on campus students benefit, the school benefits, and VBEE students benefit. It's not cheap. To do it right you need a camera man, you need to mic every student, you need streaming realplayer servers, you need good presentation monitors in the room, etc. Production quality matters. However, it's enabled me to get a masters (I'm almost done) and learn *a lot*. It's improved my career and my life.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Hmmm... Let's see: "liberal" John F Kennedy wanted to go to the moon. Had the government not spent millions trying to get to the moon, we would not have many products/materials we use today. In fact the Internet and much of the computer technology we take for granted today was funded by taxpayer funds allocated by the government.
Nuts? Hardly, it is what you call good public policy. I seriously cannot see how spending LESS money will allow you to do a better job educating MORE students...
A man who wants nothing is invincible
I remember when I was an undergraduate the most celebrated IT policy was the implementation of 24 hour computer labs.
This isn't only for night owls, sometimes you had a paper due at 8:30am and the lab officially opened at 8am, but they had to boot the computers, refill the paper trays (there was always 24 hour access to the print queues), etc.
The other thing is internet terminals, we had hundreds of them by the time I graduated but it wasn't enough. These were really handy because you could study anywhere and still be able to check course web pages and the all important e-mail.
The 24 hour lab idea could have been better, as it was only one lab was 24 hours, the one with both macs & pc's. The digital editing lab wasn't open nor was the linux/windows highend PC lab (I tried to avoid that one cuz the frosh were always playing loud muzak on the PC-speakers, ugh). Plus, with just the one lab there were queues to use the better computers even at 5 am..
I had a PC and laser printer, so I can only imagine how dependent other students were on the labs. Though I remember the top IT person gave a speach about eliminating the labs a couple years before they were expanded...
Blackboard and even campus wireless seem like a waste of money, give it back so they can trade in some of those ramen for real food.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Hello,
I think you shall spend a chunk of this money to create open source initiatives in your cs departement. That's what we do in our university : www.ift.ulaval.ca.
We hope our students to get some more experience in programming and to give our departement some kind of advertising when the project will be released.
Moreover, we encourage students (graduate students for exemple) to give small courses on hi tech stuff : linux, rmi, jini, xml, and so on.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Part of the fees at my school are used to build new "stick rooms". These are classrooms where a screen, LCD projector and Computer/VCR cart have been installed. They are called stick rooms because the computers are in a cart with an upright "stick" which has an LCD monitor attached. There are many of these throughougt the campus now, and eventually every room will be equipped this way. They are very useful in classes where the entire lab does not need computers, but the instructor does. One example is my current Networks & Communications class. The instructor has notes and Drawings on his web site. He uses the computer during his lecture to display the graphics and notes as he talks about them. This saves on the number of computer labs open for classes who need them for just one class out of the semester.
Personally, I had a horrid time at college my freshman year because of three things: no money, too much free time, and no opportunity to get a work-study position between classes. I go to a small school, so the classes I took were spread out over the whole day. I still have a difficult time scheduling classes around my part-time job.
This is not just a win-win-win, but also a win-win-win-win situation: student gets paid, university gets useful software, open-source grows, AND student gets hands-on experience, something most universities have a hard time offering.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I think there's also some competitor in the $300 range.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I personally am one of the students that has to pay for these tech fees. I would think it would be a situation if my fee's ended up paying for a larger pipeline (as others have suggested) or wireless access on campus. Granted, my campus already has a network capable of serving it's 8500 students + faculty, but still, spending it bandwidth? please. Most of these tech fee's are put in a fund, to be distributed later to each department. There is a committee from each dept that decides what to do with these fees, including students and faculty (usually NOT the IT dept of the university). As a graphic design major, i had input on what to do with these. We bought a couple of digital projection systems, high quality flatbed/drum scanners, as well as many digital camera's and DV cams. Really, it all depends on your department and your needs/wants. All the talk about more bandwidth and wireless networks here don't help your education any. There are just a cool resource to be able to use. In reality, these services aren't paid by the tech fees for the department anyway, they are paid by a general computer access fee anyway. If wireless networks help my education, sure, but personally it doesn't help the quality of my education.
I was 2nd in the US in Latin reading comprehension in high school precisely because I used to record class lectures and replay them while doing my homework. I was lucky enough to have an open-minded teacher who didn't regard this as cheating. This is a very cheap, useful technique that is VERY BENEFICIAL in foreign language classes. Plus, it would save the students the hassle of buying a recorder and sitting at the front of the class to get a good recording.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I know of several schools purchasing buses and/or big rigs and converting them into mobile computer class rooms. With a generator, switch and 20 or so thin client computers. They then take the unit into the comunity and teach basic classes for free.Your university could ask its students to teach in the class as well as maintain it. One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. You could both harden your students knowledge, provide a comunity service, as well as advertise your univerity.
Some of the ideas given:
Any student that submitted a proposal was entered in a drawing for a Palm Pilot (Which turned out to be a Handspring Visor, False advertising!). The winners were picked at random, not by whether thier proposal was choosen (If it was by whether the proposal was choosen, I would have gotten one, but I didn't...).
If you would like to get hard copies of the proposals you can request them from the VP of Information Services found in the online employee directory - Graceland University Web Site
This is not higher education, but a project for K-12 educators. It has been well recieved by Michigan educators. The idea is to create a clearing house where sites are categorirzed according to the Michigan Curriculum Framework, a state-wide classification system for teaching materials. Teachers can find resources based on the standards they have to meet.
The materials are categorized by teachers and librarians using a back end interface.
It is really simple, but effective.
http://mtn.merit.edu/
as a college student, here would be my three choices, in order of priority:
1) make sure there is enough public computer labs in my opinion, this is the single most necessary item for students
2) training for nontechnical faculty this makes it more likely that relevant course info will make it to the a course web page
3) videotape classes and broadcast online
of course, this is only if your budget is rather large.at my university (stanford), a lot of lectures are taped online, and it makes a big difference. there are a lot of times when i have rewatched parts of a lecture later on, or stepped through a confusing lecture slowly until it became clear.
I'm sure most of these have been mentioned at some point or another, but just in case:
- One of my math professors puts all his lectures and notes on the web in PDF/JPEG format AND Quicktime videos.
He uses Apple software for this (I'm sure there are alternatives) and it's an incredible help in the complex subjects he teaches: Algorithms, Graph Theory, Mathematical Logic, etc.
I'm sure not all classes would benefit from the idea, but mathematical courses and some of the more complex computer science courses definitely would.
- A "related papers" database linking research papers to each lecture in each course.
Sure, any interested student can google their way to one of the public databases, and any teacher with the time can put the links in his website (if he has one).
But having this process automated would make it easier for both students and teachers, and would allow other things: cumulative links independent from website changes, automatically sharing of links between professors, accepting submissions from students (at least graduate students), and maybe attached commentaries for each link ("a la Slashdot", without the Trolls).
- Some of my professors use egroups to share information between the students. This is a ridiculously easy/cheap way to get the students to discuss assignments and topics outside the classroom and provide them with files, links, whatever might be of their interest without interrupting lectures.
- Burn everything you can (lectures, videoconferencies, software, books, tutorials, etc) into CD-ROMs for the public library. Not everyone has access to a high-speed connection, or can spend all day in the university using the labs. This should be automated and independent of each professor.
- Internet kiosks everywhere are always a good idea.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Since so many schools have to restrict student use of file sharing software because of bandwidth issues, try releaving that problem.
Go ahead and filter at the border, to make sure that your ISP (or peering partners) isn't overloaded. Look at what the students are using the network *for*, not just what the Ivory Tower dwellers think is "apropriate" use, and help it along.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
2. student hypertext archives
3. student domain [name] incubator
4. networked projectors
5. access smartcards
There is five to ponder.
However, I have some ideas as well...
Man, that is so screwed up.
Of all the additional things that educational institutions are dinging students for these days, I think imposing a "technology fee" is disgusting.
Any fees for research should come from government, industry, and other organizations. The students should contribute to technology innvoation through their *work*, their *research*, their projects, and such. Not through a "fee".
I know about inflation, but my University (which I gruaduated from in 10 years ago), is now charging *three* times what I paid for tuition. This is just wrong that higher education is becoming more and more exclusive. Things like this fee are just plain wrong, especially if they're having trouble finding what to do with it.
Instead, they should encourage projects where interested students put their time and effort in, above and beyond, doing technologically interesting projects. People who are interested will do the world. Those who are ridden with apathy, won't be involved, and wont' care. No big loss.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Teachers were expected (but not required) to attend weekend or summer inservice training sessions without additional pay or travel expenses. When computers finally arrived in their classrooms they didn't know what to do with them and support was stretched so thin that these boxes would often sit unopened for months. Hardware and software problems chewed through their lab machines - problems as simple as a loose power cable or unplugged network card. Needless to say, for most classrooms the impact of technology was negative. Many teachers and administrators became even more resistant to technology integration as a result.
Whatever your project, ensure that you budget plenty of money for training and for technical support. This is the best possible expenditure you can make. If you have to cut costs, do it in the hardware and software. It won't be as sexy on paper, but it will have a better chance of succeeding rather than be doomed for failure from the start.
ha ha ha. i could have posted this question, since we are about to undergo another painful round of technology proposals .. at an instructional technology department in a major university.
.. another cycle is coming up again, and no one is looking forward to it.
.. but also to see
what is out there, in terms of faculty impetus, good and bad.
.. while waiting for intelligent use.
.. anywhere.
yes, infrastructure always comes first: networks and wired classrooms. but then what?
the model i have been pushing for (for an eternity) is to put our bucks into big software projects that (hopefully) serve lots of students, over a period of years, both at this university and elsewhere. creating this kind of software is no small thing, but i do have at least some evidence that such efforts pay off. we have developed a large grammar reference that serves thousands and thousands of students all over the world. similarly, we are now targeting a project on state government that has the potential of serving at least as many.
we have professional developers who partner with faculty to develop web-delivered projects. but even with that model, the projects that tend to come our way are relatively esoteric, scholarly, and/or tied to tightly focused research of an individual faculty member: not a bad thing, in and of itself, but not exactly providing bang for the buck for students.
so our approach is in creating something that provides essential information (and hopefully interactivity) for lots of students over a period of three or more years; or something that fits a world-class scholarly niche, which hasn't been replicated thousands of times elsewhere.
what this means is that, to get good material, sometimes we have to go arond the academic process and not depend on proposals per se. we either have to encourage people we have identified as ones we can work with to come up with proposals, or we approach a curriculum directly and try to find a way we can provide significant, added value without going through the usual academic channels. anyone who works with academics can perhaps identify with the possible advantages of such an approach.
having said all of this, in order to have some semblance of accountability --as much as we have talked about and implemented alternative models-- we still have to to through the pain of a proposal process
sometimes we joke that we should just pay people to stay away: that payoff would be their proposal award. just buy 'em TiBooks and be done with it. then we would be free to actually develop content that can be of use to students.
but the truth is, we still need the proposal process: to catch good and develop-able proposals
but after all is said and done, we can hopefully continue to have the option of following higher muses, which means working on projects that can actually provide benefit for students. In my experience, such projects tend to be fun to produce, transparent to use (that is, straightforward UI), and accessible (at least major parts don't depend on broadband access).
may sound like pie-in-the-sky --and it's not the kind of model that would work without at least some funding for professional development-- but if there's anything i've learned from working with technology over xx years in a university setting it's that you have to continually re-focus folks on content or they're going to forever be funding newer infrastructure that just sits there and rots
my favorite maxim is that to produce quality content, all you really need are two or three talented, dedicated people sitting in front of three reasonably equipped workstations
as some in this thread on Slashdot have pointed out, a university can provide some infrastructure and access for students who don't have alternatives, but increasingly, infrastructure and access are consumer commodities (notwithstanding the sorry lack of universal broadband access in the US. curses to Big Telcos and the ineffectual Telecommunictions Act of 1996).
we should concentrate on delivering content. and we should continue talking about that to anyone who will listen.
One thing I've always for the longest time wanted to see was a digital library accessible from outside the library's physical building. The stuff I'd want online is documentaries magazine and journals newspapers and maybe even copies of the books themselves. I've seen stuff like this before (called Onlamp I think) but it is mostly just old periodicals and has a shitty search utility. The benefits of having texts of all forms online is it becomes much easier to include passages into papers and easier for professors or TAs to go over the work and see if the student's been copying directly out of the book. While this is indeed a ton of work it might be a doable project because somebody somewhere has already thought of this.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
UCD SUX. I hate their CS classes.
;).
But their tech isn't bad (too bad the students never good to hack on anything good like it):
1) Single Sign On (SSO) for Email, RSVP class registration, Student Information System, Lab PCs, etc. They are using Kerberos to hang it all together.
2) They have this crazy idea that we need an "Enterprise Portal" (my.ucdavis.edu) to further innovation and move away from systems based applications to function based applications.
That means that the Banner Student Information System should really just be functional units like class records, add classes, submit grades, etc. Why? Because "Banner" doesn't say anything about what the system is about. Therefore, newbies have a hard time learning it.
http://nba.ucdavis.edu/ -- A New Business Architecture for UC Davis.
The SSO is cool
-Tom
- Course materials
- Course registration
- Library catalog
- Journals (medical, etc)
- Job/intership listings
- Email (web based)
And more. I'm sure other universities have similar offerings. Just look around.Many technology projects "for the people" are too ambitious. As any implementer knows, buy-in and pr are essential to a succesful rollout, particularly with a lot of complexity.
The key for success I think is to leverage existing assets, trends, and needs, in order to bring the school into a digital mindset.
I reccommend something that would thrust the school into the future. Something that would itself encourage everyone to use it. Something that would eventually lead to more funding for technology to build out the infrastructure.
Digitize all the content owned by the university and catalog it according to an existing metadata standard. Then, plug it into a dynamic web-publishing system with built-in collaboration tools.
With access to alot of coursework online, and the ability to discuss, comment, embellish, and self-publish, students will find the system useful.
The university will have the freedom to repurpose content to multiple distribution paths, like university coalitions, e-learning initiatives, even DVD's of entire courses for distance-learners ($$$).
What's more, with collaboration and dynamic publishing, all interaction through the system can be repurposed as well.
There are open-source tools which can fit these needs, hardware is cheap. Students work for free. The big money should be saved for digital rights management.
How about blocking cell phone frequencies from every class room, lecture hall, and laboratory. Cell phones ringing during a lecture makes me crazy, and I'm a student. If I were a professor, I'd go bloody postal. No one should have a cell phone in class - it's very rude, and very disruptive. And I don't care if they forgot to turn it off, one ring is one ring too many. It's never just one ring either. The student with the phone has to root through their jacket or back pack to find the phone and turn it off - usually 3+ rings later.
And seriously, unless you're a student with some kind of job that requires you to have a cell phone at all times (yeah right, how many students have that kind of job) you don't need to have a bloody phone with you at all times! Leave the thing at home for the sake of your class mates, and your embarassment.
I'm fairly certain there isn't any student who needs a phone in class. None of the students whose phone has rang in my classes have ever answered it. They turn it off as quickly as they can, while 200+ people stare them down.
-kidlinux.
Why in my day, we had to trod thru snow three feet deep...
You refreshed a few 20 year old neurons with that remark though. I can remember the registrar's office with the box of little pencils on the counter. How quaint!
But the school was up-to-date in some ways. The campus police had terminals connected to CompSci's VAX to manage parking tickets. The bastards.
I'm a student at GATECH which also charges students for a technology fee, one of the reasons being that it's easier to get such fee past the regents than a tuition increase, and that there is always a need for new technology that would not be covered in any other form (it's easy to buy computers for research, but unless large industry donors are interested in a particular program, it's hard to find the money for classroom computers). I have also been one of the student members of the technology fee commitee (2 undergrad students, 2 grad students, 4 faculty) for the last 3 years.
Georgia Tech also asks for computers being owned by undergrad students, and curiously this instead of reducing the demand for campus clusters, has increased it, as the well as the demand for campus printers. All the dorms and the greeks have campus internet connectivity, and wireless access is being implemented on many buildings (some of it from these technology funds).
The process in place (which we will be modifying very soon) requires that schools, departments, and student organizations write proposals requesting the use of such fees. And once a year the schools rank their proposals, and the main commitee reviews these proposals and suggest fund assignments accordingly. Being in a campus-wide committee lets us see the clear disparity between campus entities, while some are asking for $500K+ mostly useless items in their proposals, others just ask for $1K- for memory upgrades to their 300MHz computers.
Over the last 3 years I have seen the technology requests raise from 35 or so proposals to 130, and from barely $2E6 to almost $9E6. Of these, about 2/3 are computers, or somewhat computer related proposals. However a significant amount, which are normally large ticket items, are for tools that could not be funded otherwise. i.e. mass spectrometers, CNC machines, oscilloscopes, plasma cutters, compressors, pumps, differential GPS systems, liquid flow demostration equipment, electric properties labs, etc.
However the majority of the funds are being used for campus-wide or college-wide software licenses, computer clusters, presentation-enabled rooms, student participations systems, "smart" boards, student-managed web/mail/file/streaming servers, video cameras, video editing stations, bewolf clusters, and even basic security systems (as a means to protect our investments).
We do make a point of not spending the funds in basic infrastructure (like lab remodeling) or salaries (unless a short-term student position is very-well justified), or on items that are mostly research-oriented, or clearly professor-centric (i.e. a new top of the line laptop, or palm device).
After my long tenure in the committee, this has become very clear:
Stephan
Try hiring tech support that exhibits some small ability to actually problem solve. Tech support at the University level is some of the worst I've ever seen; and even more appalling, these pseudo-geeks actually think they're savvy. I've run into more obnoxious, arrogant little fools in University tech departments than in any private company, their idiocy only exceeded by their contempt for the people they supposedly support.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
The Uni I work at has just started a trial on portable MP3 players, for recording lectures... with the aim of streaming them in a format students are familiar with, are fairly small per our of voice. We currently have four recorders on order (two memory card, two hard drive) to see which works best. Hopefully in a few years time you'll be able to wirelessly use your palm/player to download and play lectures in the common room or park. It beats lectures.
yeah right, at my University people even stole the mouse balls.
The laptops would just never come back after the summer break.
i've got it. it's so obvious. invest in a technology which will return aimlessly collected student fees to students. you know, something like a real 'backbone'.
i just would like to give a brief infor about what we are doing with the information development fee (or technology fee in your case):
1. we are placing a computer in each classroom with internet access, lcd projector, vcd,vhs players
2. we are offering free training to faculty for applications of microsoft, adobe, and macromedia.
3. we are using it to get a bandwidth ratio of 2mbits/150 computers
we plan to increase the fee so we can do the additional stuff:
1. create an online video/audio archive that will store self-produced materials and purchased documentaries
2. create an online database of published journals by the students and teachers
3. create an archiving system to digitize all records (books, grades, etc.) that are 1985 and earlier (we have lots of those)
4. create a student portal where they can see their grades, arrange schedules, message boards, e-mail system, etc.
5. purchase more computers to be placed throughout the library
i hope this will help you. i am very happy that this article has been posted. it is similar to what we have been doing for the past 2 years.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
I've taken a couple of computer related classes at University of Maryland University College - the continuing ed part of UM. There are a bunch of classes, & I've been happy with them. They're the same classes, for the same fee, as you'd get on campus. Last class I took there were people from all over the US & at least one in Europe...
How about this: instead of tacking on yet another fee for frivolous items that students have to pay at institutions of higher learning, drop the fee and let the students have the extra $50-$500 a year. Let them buy their own technology with that extra cash instead of letting some bureaucrat pad the coffers of the university.
I've seen blackboard mentioned, but that's normally just one part of the puzzle. Blackboard doesn't handle all of the class registration part of the puzzle. There is one, called 'Banner' from SCT, which handles it, but from my personal experience, it's a pain in the ass, as every upgrade to the system requires re-applying your configurations to it. [Which might take multiple man-years to apply for some colleges]
Supposedly, PeopleSoft has a module specifically for educational institutions, but I've never seen it. I also know that there was work being done up at Harvard back in 1996 for basically what you said above. I have no idea what ever became of it.
As for getting students to use the system -- students have a 4 year turnover. You can get an over 95% compliance in 4 years just because they don't know what the old system was. Your problem lies in administration. And you can't have students do this work, due to restrictions by FERPA. It would have to be tightly controled by the Office of the Registrar or the equivalent office.
And as a person who was one of those students making enterprise solutions in the mid 1990s, I'd have to say that student run projects are bound to fail in the long run for larger instutions, due to the lack of documentation, and incorrect dependancies on legacy systems. Although students may make good programmers, major projects need to be led by full time personel who are directly responsible for the project.
(and as for wireless...my university was one of the test beds for Richochet in 1995. Damned nice system for $300/yr at the time... too bad they went under)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
The biggest gripe I had was when I'd start work on a paper or lab report, then have to go to class, then try to continue the report elsewhere, but the software I needed wasn't there or was a different version.
Spend the money on making sure all the public systems (or, at least, particular labs) have a standard set of software, including a word processor, a graphing program, a music composer (if that's big at your school), a spreadsheet program, and some kind of low-level graphic-creator (even clip art would work for most things).
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
If you have the cash, take care of the lab assistants/consultants that are hard workers. Pay at UK wasn't particularly great and therefore, some of the consultants were sub par or simply sleepers. As pay rose, the better techs came out of the woodwork looking for jobs.
Read my plan to save the Bengals
Our CIS monies went for more routers and switches in the Cisco Lab and a Lab Server and a classroom LAN in our MS Lab (In addition to our existing school LAN.) We are just now starting to offer *nix classes.
Top things I've seen done with these tech grants are:
Laptop checkouts (IceBooks == sweet!)
Connectivity (wireless is great, but a chicken in every pot, or rather a RJ-45 at every library table or booth is excellent)
Multimedia (ahh, buzzword! I know, but having a dedicated lab with dual quicksilvers (733? can't remember), copius amounts of macromedia/adobe software and both weekly tutorials AND classes willing to use the stuff makes for happy students who are blending the ol' liberal arts with some more technical skills)
Bandwidth is an important one, but doing it properly is key. As has been suggested, smart routing to keep the filesharing users from taking all the bandwidth, but without shutting them down, is key
-jon
"It takes an uncommon mind to think of these things." --Calvin