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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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
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
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 Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
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.
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