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

Campus-wide wireless?

[Stiletto]

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.

Not really ideas, but receptive staff

[da3dAlus]

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.)

Network backup service

[cperciva]

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.

Tech Fees.

[saintlupus]

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

Another fee to students?

[PhotoGuy]

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