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.

Database.

[MindStalker]

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.

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.

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.