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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
First problem with your 'idea' is $800. Any laptop you're gonna get for $800 is not worth the effort currently. Second problem: Even if you get that $800 laptop now, it'll be well obsolete long before the end of that 4 years. Realistic laptop costs are still over $2000 for something worthwhile that will last long enough to be worth the trouble. Don't forget, you'll need to add infrastructure to support those laptops, either wireless or wired jacks somewhere, preferably many somewheres. Oh, and staff? Add at least one or two IT staff members to support those folks.
Now, if you're talking a public sector institution, you're likely going to also have to deal with a public bid situation for who gets to sell you the laptops. Better cut your specifications pretty tight, or you might end up with some fly-by-night vendor that can't support you. Even for major vendors, arrange spares on-hand, because overnight shipping frequently isn't, and students paying that kind of money for a laptop will get pissed in a hurry if they don't get to use it. Oh, and are you leasing, or purchasing? If leasing, is it a buyout lease, or Fair Market Value? We did a FMV, and found out that if we still wanted to buy them it would be $1000 per unit after two years. I don't think those units are still worth $1000. This issue only gets worse after 4 years.
I could come up with more, but that should at least give some idea of the problems faced when we went through this.
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
However, I have some ideas as well...