Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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:
. . .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.
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.
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.
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
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,
Here's a thought. Ask the students what they think their money should be spent on. :-)
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.
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...
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.
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
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
When PCs started really becoming common in everyone's house (umm..like 1994 or so), you could always tell who the hard-core techies were, because they had these ancient machines held together with duct tape and glue. Be proud of your ancient machine.
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...
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
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
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Its sick, how much money is wasted on software licenses. Maybe schools and uni's should just put it all in the campus furnace instead. Atleast that would keep the students warm.
The only thing you should be spending money on, is bandwidth, and terminals to access it... oh and food, and pr0n
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I think there's also some competitor in the $300 range.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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...
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.
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.
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.
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