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?"

Comments

off the top of my head...

[feldsteins]

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.

Little innovation right now + many lazy people =

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

top of the line innovation:

[augros]

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?

Re:Campus-wide wireless?

[RC514]

Wireless networking on the whole campus is nice, of course, but it isn't educational if there is no educational content or projects which make use of the network. Looking at stories about the bandwith demand at universities, I guess the networks are mostly there (although not always wireless), but the on-topic content is missing. I'd say, put the money into virtualizing lecture material and developing new forms of presenting educational material. Some things can be expressed much better in an animation or interactive 3d-model for example, ways of presentation which are usually unvailable today.

Invest in open source

[MobyDisk]

Use the money to pay students to work on open source projects. This kind of stuff would be a win-win-win: student gets paid, university gets useful software, open-source grows.

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.

Spend it on people!

[melquiades]

It seems like almost all of these lackluster "tech in education" ideas are focused on hardware -- and totally miss the point, not only of technology in the classroom, but of how all learning works. While it is a disgrace that so many schools have such out-of-date technology, it's much more a disgrace that so much technology, so costly to schools, is essentially useless.

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:

• Hire non-paranoid sysadmins who know enough about security to open up computers for student use. If technology is inaccessible, due to either technological or physical controls, it's a waste. Students need to be able to experiment to learn.
  
  
• Give teachers technology training (if they want it -- don't shove it down their throats).
  
  
• Bring in full- or part-time experts in technology fields to teach technology subjects: programming, graphic design, desktop publishing, system administration. Bring them into the rest of the curriculum, so that (for example) if students are publishing a magazine, they have access to the desktop publishing person.
  
  
• Such experts are often (obviously) expensive. But there are many decent people who are willing to volunteer part-time. Hire a technology volunteer coordinator, and give them a budget they can do something with.
  
  
• And, for heaven's sake, pay teachers a decent salary.
  

Re:Spend it on people!

[Lumpy]

They cant / wont.

I applied several times to K-12 schools, large K-12 schools to be the sysadmin/netadmin/it/is guy. There are hundreds of offers out there and hundreds of jobs out there for this position, even right now they are there.. problem is that the schools want to pay about the same that McDonalds or burger King pay's for someone to say "you want fries with that?" but expect 15 years expierience (one I saw and made me die laughing said "requires 5 years expierience with windows 2000") and some even try to require BS or MS in computer science. and these positions are NEVER full time. they are 20 hrs a week part time so they can avoid giving you benifits.

the K-12 schools who have a clue hire a real fulltime person, or have an awesome CS teacher who does it, or even better, has a student run IT department...(yes dorothy it can happen and happen well) but they are very very rare.

Problem is that many teachers unions also BLOCK hiring of these tech people or impose insane restrictions.(and the salary is part of that too!)

Getting more people in the K-12 schools to manage the technology is great, it's an awesome idea. but it wont happen until you get state or federal mandates forcing the schools to put a person there. Because they would rather increase the coach's salary or spend it on new shiny sports gear instead of trying to actually educate the children.

Re:Spend it on people!

[melquiades]

problem is that the schools want to pay about the same that McDonalds or burger King pay's for someone to say "you want fries with that?" but expect 15 years expierience

K-12 schools are invariably on a completely unworkable budget. Thus the "bitter irony" of Microsoft's school donation plan, and so many other technology grants: how much good can it do to plop machines the middle of a school when the facilities are in disrepair, the administration is understaffed, the classes are large, and teachers are underpaid?

It's true, both K-12 schools and their donor often fail to understand the true costs of technology.

Problem is that many teachers unions also BLOCK hiring of these tech people or impose insane restrictions.(and the salary is part of that too!)

Thus the last item in my list -- "for heaven's sake, pay the teachers a decent salary". When the salary pool is way too small, there will be bitter battles over it, and you end up with these silly things that teachers' unions do. Have you ever heard of a programmers' union imposing a restriction like this on the salaries of sysadmins? ;)

My thoughts

[macdaddy]

I too work at a university and the question has come up here before. It's already been suggested but wireless is a good way to go. Another might be to raise disk space quotas. More bandwidth is good but you also have to take care of what you buy. ie, buy a Packeteer to go with it. More lab machines. Better lab machines. Laptop checkout. NIDS to help better security. Minimal support of a local gaming server for the dorms. I know it sounds unusual and doesn't sound like it supports education, but really it does. Everyone needs to upplug from reality every so often--students included. Kids love gaming. Hell I love gaming. Netadmins hate gaming over the 'Net connection because of the bandwidth demands (I'm a netadmin). Supply some resources to have one local to campus that can only be accessed from the campus. Donate it to the SGA and let them admin it. Create a technology resource center where students can reserve time to use high tech stuff like fancy scanners, CD burners, etc...

Here's a thought. Ask the students what they think their money should be spent on. :-)