Slashdot Mirror
Has the Internet Changed College?
gosand asks: "When I began college in 1988, it was the first time I was able to interact with a large group of very different people. This helped me to see the world in different aspects, and helped to make me who I am today. During my college days I formed/reformed many of my opinions on things, although refining them has been a continual process. I often wonder how my experience might have been different if the internet, as it exists today, would have been around then. Sure, there was gopher, ftp, and BBSs, but only a relatively few people knew about them and used them. There wasn't online gaming to lure you away from your studies for hours at a time. If you wanted music, you went to the used CD store or joined Columbia House and BMG 5 times under different names. You had to actually communicate with people in person instead of email, and you had to go to the library and do your research from books. You only had a computer if you were in CS, and sometimes not even CS students had them. I am not suggesting that one way is better than the other, just noting the differences. Have computers and the internet made college life any easier in some respects? Have they made it harder? How has the internet affected your opinions on things during these formative years? These may seem like easy questions, but I have a feeling that there are a wide range of opinions out there."
You also forgot how it made porn much easier to get for the college student
What? Huh? It was GOING to college, and a particular one?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
when i started college in 1989, i used to telnet in to play the Twin Peaks MUD. even then, it only took 1 hour of my time each time i sat down. 1 year later, my friends in their dorm rooms would spend mabye 1 or 2 hours at a time on Nintendo.
in any case, its nothing like sitting and playing Diablo for days on end...
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Yes it did.
Next topic!
Has it gotten easier? In some respects maybe. Has it gotten more effective? Very likely in that more people who go to school to learn something like programming have access to actual computers to work out their problems on and aren't forced to work purely in theory.
A couple years ago as an undergrad I was a lowsy programmer. I was on an all PC campus and had my powermac with me, so I couldn't do any of the programming assignments without heading over to one of the labs. Now, as a grad student we're programming in Java, and I can do my development on my latest Mac, so I can do coding into the wee hours on my own machine. That ability to experiment with the language on my own time has made learning new things much easier.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Seems we have to work a lot harder to separate the wheat from the chaff now.
It doesn't matter what people's opinions are on this subject. The people that didn't have the Internet in college can't offer any insight in to whether or not its any easier, or even any different because they only experienced it one way. Same thing with the people that did have the Internet available.
/.
Just look at your own life and see how the Internet has changed things in your daily routines and there's the effect it has kids going to college right now.
All you're really going to get is people talking about piracy and porn when it comes to this topic on
Working at a University, one change seems to be the position of the school in its role of protecting the academic freedom of students. Traditionally, schools would handle discipline problems internally, often protecting students from law enforcement for minor infractions. That protective layer, acting formally or informally "in loco parentis" let students stretch their wings a little, with a corresponding benefit to academics and research. The Internet has brought the world into the campus. For example, schools now struggle to protect their students from the RIAA, while balancing political necessity. Many schools now actually act, to some degree, as enforcers on behalf of copyright owners. That shift puts the school and the students into more adversarial positions than may have existed before the Internet was big. In the past, schools could "look the other way" or just issue "warnings" while students pushed the envelope of what was and was not allowed, now security concerns and the concerns of private industry have made campuses much less safe places for students to test the waters and try things out.
Many University administrators see that problem very clearly, and try to strike a politically surviveable balance to keep academic freedom alive.
~
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." -Emerson
This is a very interesting question, because you're sort of asking how the Internet has altered a particular group.
It's interesting to me that my son has never known what vinyl LP's look like, has never known of a day without cell phones, and doesn't understand how the Internet revolutionized the way information is spread about. He uses it to play, to listen to music, to research homework, and communicate (not necessarily in that order).
There's a ton more information available now than in my college days. Sure, one can go to the library and get reams of information, but it's not sorted, as if I had typed in a search request to a popular search engine. So the amount of time I spent slogging over to the library and looking up the one book that might have a shred of information is instead used to put the finishing touches on the project. I'm not sure whether or not the colleges have risen to the challenge that the high availability of information has posed.
Thanks for a thought provoking question!
We all get along together like tornadoes and trailer parks.
The internet has changed almost everything about how we use, view, find, and explore information. Mas it made things easier or more difficult? I doubt either. You still have to understand how to formulate the information you find, and deduce conclusions from it. You still have to present it in a correct format. You lose a huge social value in the college experience though, and that may well be too bad. College computer labs used to be 'places to go', they used to be communities as well as places to work. Now they are empty. SO yes, for every loss is a gain.
Ross Winn "not just another ugly face..."
I now teach at the university I attended in the early 80's as an undergrad, so I have a little before-and-after vision regarding this. Email has, IMO, really changed things. Students rarely bother coming to office hours, which I typically spend replying to a steady stream of email about assignments and such. I regard this as a good thing. The communication with students perhaps isn't as deep, but is certainly more accessible (I recall a few times where I was too intimidated to go to a professor's office hours).
How has the internet affected your opinions on things during these formative years?
Apparently, it is now much easier to write term papers.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Technologies like IM, virtual whiteboards & collaboration software has made group projects, lab work & research easier. Data, facts & knowledge used to be centrally located in the university library. Low cost PCs & internet connectivity have usurped the "central knowledge source" attribute of the library. I have heard non-CS/IT students (photo & fine art majors) say, "Just look it up on the web." when just a few years ago they would have to consult a journal or book for their art class. It is this decentralized way to get information that IMO has changed academia.
My education all the way through high school always taught & reinforced that the library is "where its at." Seven years later, we now know that google.com is where its at. I see similarities between the widespread use of the internet & search engines and post-Gutenberg books & publications.
What hasnt the internet changed in one way or another.
...from selling the candid photos of "girls gone wild" (ok girls piss drunk) at frat parties to interested buyers!
One thing I can't believe people lived without were class web sites. On one page I can see:
:)
- course syllabus
- assignment/lab report/essay due dates
- exams dates
- (sometimes) class notes
- marks
- how to contact the professor (email, phone, office hours, etc)
It has probably drastically cut down people going to see the prof during his office hours to ask silly little questions and also improves professor to class communication. Email does the same thing as well.
Of course it also makes students lazy.
Archived class web sites are also useful for research. I can't count the number of times I've found a useful bit of info on an old class web site from MIT or the like.
----- rL
The faculty, in some cases, aren't evolving with it. I've had some faculty members that welcomed laptops in the classroom, for example. We have a wireless network, whihch makes it incredibly to take notes, and actually pay attention in class, rather than scribble furiously and pray that you can understand it later.
Some, on the other hand (primarily faculty in the Liberal Arts fields, from my experience), don't want anything to do with the net. We have a couple of online course management solutions that let students track grades, turn in assignents, etc. online. I've had classes where the professor use it to distribute 1 thing: the syllabus.
At OU, we've got a fairly progressive faculty (at least in the College of Engineering), I just feel sorry for those stuck in a place where everything's done by the book. literally.
Michael C. Hollinger
[In 1988] you had to actually communicate with people in person instead of email, and you had to go to the library and do your research from books.
I don't know about you, but I got my first undergrad email account in 1985. And I was NOT a CS student, or even a science or engineering student. It was BITNET, not Internet, but I could email to Internet accounts through a gateway, could telnet to other folks' accounts at different universities, could use finger, could play a game with a number of different users logged into the main university computer, and could also do a text IM (one 80-char line at a time) with different users logged into the main university computer. The fundamental differences are 1. graphics, 2. clientization of the system - now instead of going to the library or the computer room to do this, a student could do it from his dormroom - and 3. expansion to a larger community (but even in 1985, folks would IM who were not even remotely computer savvy).
On the other hand, even today you have to go to the library to do your research. Except for a handful of fields (CS, for instance) that have a high uebergeek quotient and a need for speed, most useful research is still published on dead trees.
While your question obviously is interested in how the Internet has changed college, but your discussion seems to ask how the availability of computers has changed college.
I don't think the Internet itself has had a significant noticable impact on college. There's the obvious circumstances where people buy term papers on-line, or ask for help with their homework assignments, but this certianly doesn't count as a fundamental change. University e-mail and instant messaging certianly changes the way we communicate, but that's not really the Internet as it's only on a local scale.
I'd imagine many non CS majors (and even some CS majors) can go through college and almost never use the Internet. My GF for example is majoring in medicine and only visits an occasional website. I can certianly say the Internet has not had much, if any, impact on her college life.
Computers, on the other hand, have changed the world, and in so many ways you don't need me to describe them here.
If I returned to school now, I would expect to be a better student than before, partly because of my age and partly because of the massive amount of knowledge I've learned as a result of browsing the internet.
As a sometimes lazy person in college, I can say that a lot of the tedious/annoying things that needed to be done were much aided by the college network. Like, if I had to go to the library to look up some little fact, I just wouldn't have done it.
Also, it means you can sometimes get things done in off hours that normally you would have to do during the day, like signing up for classes, turning in assignments, asking a prof/student a question, etc.
And as a language student, I can say that a few really decent sites dealing with your language can make life much easier. For example, dict.leo.org has definitions and grammatical information for almost any German word or phrase, including common slang and very new words. Going through this site instead of a dictionary makes things go so much faster and I can keep my thoughts flowing. Also, reading German news and keeping up cultural stuff is so much easier and *cheaper*. And keeping in touch with friends abroad (and meeting new ones) is of course almost immeasurably easier with the Internet. There is no comparison.
And being able to email a professor that you aren't feeling well and can't come to class, instead of having to call and sound sick, is also a nice thing.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
I was a CpE in school, on the ACM programming team, etc, but my political and social views were still largely affected by the conversations had while sitting around at 5a on a tuesday, drunk, talking to my fraternity brothers in the KA house basement.
You can't help but be affected by the college atmosphere, it's a completely different world than what 90% of the kids knew growing up. No parents, no curfews, complete (mostly) freedom. It's the first taste of adult life where you're on your own and required to make life altering decisions.
Has computing changed college? Absolutely. Has it changed social interaction? Not that much. Whereas the computer nerds congregated in darkened labs in the 70's, they now sit at their own desks IMing, IRCing and posting to message boards. You'll always have that. If anything, a computer on every desk has given people MORE time for social interaction, since they don't have to spend hours correcting misspellings on a type writer and can instead word process.
Same thing with living in the country. I grew up in cities/suburbs, except for 4 years wa-ay out in the country during HS. After 25 years, I'm back in the country, due to a death in family. Except this time, even with only dialup, I don't feel trapped in the hinterlands. And, yes, I'm taking college classes online. It's different both ways. I'm going to college from 20 miles out in the country, and I like living here because a global perspective is only a local phone call away. (The national calling plan on me cell helps, too.)
I know christianity isn't popular on slashdot or amongst geeks (hackers portrait says we're rare but not unknown). Nonetheless, there is a verse in there which is pertinent to this conversation:
"many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase"
I quote that mainly because I'm not sure we always take note of how different the world is from what it was. King Solomon commented on how there was nothing new under the sun. Under Chinese religion (can't remember exactly what), they say nothing is ever quite the same. I think both are true. We have changed so much, but we are essentially the same as those who went before us.
What amazes me the most is how much the world has changed in 10, 20, 50 and 100 years. What amazes me more is just how quickly we can adapt to the change. Computers as we know them today weren't around 20 years ago. A new technology comes out and people can learn it within a few days, weeks or months.
I was thinking the other day about books, when I got my sharp zaurus. I thought, this is cool I can put books on this device and read them while I'm away. The gutenberg project gives me access to a wealth of information. I was in a shopping center at the time, and I looked around at all the people and thought, "we have so much wisdom available and hardly any of it is going to be touched". I wondered how many books we have at our fingertips that before the printing press people would have been delighted to get their hands on.
But I digress a little. Nowadays we can travel hundreds of kilometers in less than an hour by means of aircraft. We can communicate virtually instantly with people all over the world. When we want, culture and political barriers can be circumvented. We have an unprecedented capacity to learn, and it's only going to increase in the future. And it just amazes me how quickly humans are able to adapt and comprehend the changes. Slashdotters are, in general, unique in the world in our ability to comprehend the changes. But the using of the technology is not so far off that your grandmother can't eventually learn it. Our generation will have lived and learned about rapid change. Even if we can no longer learn and understand what's behind it, we will be able to use it.
I just think, so much has changed, yet essentially everything is the same. We eliminated hunger problems in rich countries so that we no longer need to work much to eat. Now people work for other things - electricity, internet access, computers, etc. If we ever make them as ubiquitous as air, then there will be something else to work for. I think this is a universal principle - we will *always* work no matter what changes. We'll just find new ways of doing what we already want to do, and faster, more efficiently. I think some of the primary ones (not true in all circumstances, but mostly): work, love, learning, life, communication.
Anyway, there's no real coherency to these thoughts. Just reminding everyone of how much it's changed. It's sometimes hard for me to appreciate how much it's changed. I yearn new techology and the change it brings, so for me these things are not overpowering or daunting. I feel it's moving too slow. Yet most feel it's going too fast, and though it doesn't feel that way to me in general I have to agree - and step back and see it that way every now and then.
work requirements for students and teachers has gone up. people have access to more info, so the paper is expected to be of a higher quality with more valid research. problem is checking for cheaters.
How many times have I had this conversation? "Hey what's that new son--" Song is already playing off my computer, having downloaded already.
[almost]Anytime I want to know something, I can look it up online, thanks to IMDb, allmusic.com, google, etc. I guess that's a difference in all life, not just college. But it helps that I have an always-on 10Mbit connection.
Another interesting story: I was taking a music class and one student who didn't have a computer and lived off campus handed in the first paper handwritten. The teacher wouldn't accept it and made her take it to the computer lab and type it up. I guess that's an appreciable change to how things were before.
Regular mail correspondence has also disappeared. There was something nice about seeing a message from someone in their own handwriting. Email is nice b/c of its speed and convenience, but it can't really match handwritten letters for the "personal touch."
Just a few observations...
What college did you go to?
>There wasn't online gaming to lure you away from
>your studies for hours at a time.
Riiight...So you weren't cool enough to get invited to play Empire (http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/empire/faq/). Or a MUD. Okay. At my school, you could tell who was playing because they'd all head for their PC or a terminal once an hour, every hour, if they'd even left the terminal at all.
Well, instead you could have been playing dorm-wide games of Strategic Conquest (over homebuilt PhoneNet connectors) like we were. Shit, we even played the Ur-Doom, MazeWars. Or even single-player games. I had a bad habit of getting really deeply into Dark Castle every time exams rolled around.
>You had to actually communicate with people in
>person instead of email, and you had to go to
>the library and do your research from books.
You didn't have email? Email is ancient. Usenet, too. I recall searching online for research info when I was in college. Sure, it wasn't exactly like now, where I google "Spanish Inquisituion" and can enter my credit card and download a term paper. But that's what the ads in Rolling Stone were for.
> You only had a computer if you were in CS, and
>sometimes not even CS students had them.
At Virginia Tech in 1986, every CS student had a Mac XL running (I think) XENIX, Microsoft's UNIX clone. Every engineering student had an IBM running DOS, Microsoft's CP/M clone. Buying one (at a super discount) was a requirement for incoming students.
I remember some witnessing some spectacular drunken arguments, CS students vs. Engineering students, about Mac GUI vs. PC command line goodness. Part of me wishes all those arrogant anti-gui fuckwads are today stuck at runlevel 3, but I suspect they're tweaking their KDE prefs even now.
Granted, there might be a group of people from any one school that spans a 4 year period in which they witnessed both, but even their lives started to get influenced by computers and the internet prior to it actually hitting their campus.
Funny, where I'm at, in 1988, every student that I had ever met had an id on either the Unix or VAX clusters at all the universities.
There were TONS of Internet games.
Internet chat was the big deal at the time.
The Internet hasn't changed all that much, except for the advent of the WWW. Everything else that's out here fairly well existed (the WWW including the media facilities...) before then.
Instant Messaging didn't exist, but IRC did, so that was sort of the Universal Instant Messenger (oh, and TALK.. )
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Have computers and the internet made college life any easier in some respects?
:)
In my computer science courses, the prelab questions would be posted online, and after they were due, the answers were posted online.
The answers were also in the google cache...
My girlfriend and I are the top two students in EE at a small but prominent school in Texas in 1989. She is deciding between UC Berkeley and MIT for grad school, and I am choosing between the equivalent med schools... A letter (remember paper?) from a Prof at Berkley has an email address on it (joe@ucb.edu, or something like that) I go "hey, their computer's email uses the "@" sign just like our VAX." Leave it to my girlfriend, the smart one, to say "maybe the computers are connected!"
The only way to find out for sure is to go back to college yourself, bro. Any one of us can tell you that it has changed, but compared to what? A student now has no way of telling what it was like back in the day, because they weren't there.
I remember the library, too. I'd still probably use it if I went back today: I am more comfortable with citing published works as sources; your eyes don't hurt as much reading a book compared to a screen; and you never know if the guy on the web is full of crap, or crazy, or what. Besides, from what I hear, students today just buy their term papers online anyway. Screw Cliffs Notes!
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
All the coffee houses left over from the '60s were in the process of being remodeled and turned into discos. I wanted to study microprocessors, but there was no course on them, only a course in IBM 360 assembly language taught by people who couldn't speak English. Then I looked for a course in electronics design (having built my own clocks and filters out of ICs) and you had to take a bunch of hard math first. (If certifications had existed I would have ditched college and taken some tests instead.) There was no cable TV, cell phones, or PCs. It was illegal to have an extension phone without renting the phone from, and paying an additional monthly service fee to, AT&T (the phone company). If you were lucky you got to use a college glass tty wired to a DEC PDP-10. A pinball machine, Spirit of '76, was released with 7-segment LED displays and solenoids powered by ICs, in place of electromechanical number wheels and relays. Saturday Night Live was new, and funny. Punk rock was playing at CBGBs, but not on WNEW-FM (the music industry hype station). Drugs were better then, and a lot cheaper. For music, we played records and it was cool to watch them spin around and around. Occasionally you bumped into the turntable and bbbbbrrrrrrtt! It cost 50c to ride the NYC subway. The World Trade Center was new. Geeky wasn't cool, or even understood.
Let me qualify this with today being my example. I woke up and printed out the lecture notes outline for one of my classes from the internet (only available on the class homepage), which is basically required for every class. After class I went to the library to enroll in classes for the fall. This can be done in to ways. One is over the phone using a "press 1 for this, press 2 for that" menu or on the internet (guess which one i used). I also used the computer to access the course catalog since the paper version is like 20 bucks at the bookstore. Then I jumped onto another computer to look up some material for a research paper (the old card catalog doesn't exist anymore). I located the article I needed, but wait they have the full text right on the computer. I didn't even need to venture into the stacks. It even had the option of emailing the whole thing to my computer at home. And that was just today. My school has become entirely dependent on computers for not only administrative purposes but for communication between professors and student. Almost all my assignments are posted to the web, and much of the work I submit is through the internet as well.
Instead of hacking MUD's and playing Ultima 2 on my Apple ][e, in the days I went to college, kids today are hacking games like 'Counter-Strike' and pirating music.
Dolemite
_______________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
well, i think i might be able to give a better insight into this topic then many because i was in college for 5 years starting in 1992 and finishing in 1997. The vast shift in technology at that time gave me a chance to actually witness the quite rise of the internet. To give an example, i remember the old z-80 terminals and green and white paper and have seen how things were done when most work in the CS department was still on the mainframe ( they were still in use when i started) but i also saw the birth and death of mosaic and the birth of Netscape and internet explorer not the mention the rise and fall of OS/2 before I graduated.
During all of that time i worked in the college computer center and had a chance to see how these changes in technology affected people. When i started college ( and especially a few years before ) the internet/ file sharing all that kind of thing was a geeks only activity. I remember people having debates about weather or not it would be a good thing for commercial traffic to be allowed on the internet, because it was considered banned activity on what at the time was thought of a government funded research network. It wasn't something that the people on the football team knew anything about unless they were majoring in CS. E-mail too was used only by people in the CS department and the like. In contrast by the time i graduated people were assigned an e-mail account at the time they registered for school and were expected to use it for things like getting their homework assignment for Home economics 100.
I think the effect for the most part has been positive. From what Iâ(TM)ve seen there reason why the technology was adopted is BECAUSE it makes peoples lives easier. That after all the point of technology isnâ(TM)t it. I think if it fails that test the non geeks lose interest in it real quick. I think people coordinate the schedules better and have an easier time doing research then they otherwise did.
There are also some major down shots that come to mind.
The down shot on the research side is a I think there is a lot of debate right now on how to judge the academic value of web pages as a primary source. People have problems with them for 3 reasons.
1) they can be written by anyone ( sometimes crackpots)
2) it is difficult to get an idea of how credible the author is from an academic standpoint
3) what good is a reference that can be erased or taken down tomorrow in a research paper that you hope to be able to shelve and come back to in 20 years.
So there is an on going debate that you would never have had if it wasnâ(TM)t for the internet coming into use.
The last time i checked, which was about 4 years ago there was a major problem developing in academic environments and that involved the administration of the computer resources. This comes from experience Iâ(TM)ve drawn from two college campuses
My own and that of someone I was dating.
Often times the lowly computer department on campuses was suddenly thrust to the status of near demigod amongst administrative departments because they have the power to turn on and off your computing resources. Now if you do something ( put up the wrong kind of web page or run a not so approved of server for instance.) you may not be able to do your homework for classes and you may be cut out of most of your social network by loss of your e-mail account. This would result in a de-facto expulsion of sorts because it would almost guarantee the failure of student that couldn't do there work double that affect if you happen to be in a computer related major, but many majors on campus REQUIRE you to use e-mail as part of the class. To get announcements etc.. To make matters worse when i left school there was very little being done to police the activity of the administrators in these departments they were making a lot of rules based on things like. This makes our job easier ( regardless of academic merit or lack there of of what you are doing.) And penalizing peopl
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
I attended college in 1995-97 and thus was one of the first classes that had ethernet to the dorm (iirc the university was 80% done at the time). MP3 usage was common, and got me into listening to a bunch of different music (and purchasing cds! *gasp*). It helped me pick up computers [or rather non-DOS/amiga computing] and learn networking. It helped me meet people around campus and make friends. It helped me play a perverbial shitload of quake.
:], so the internet connection (and to a lesser degree the lan itself) were hard to ignore when it came time to do homework, or go to class, or do the things I should be doing.
Mainly though, it was really great at distracting me. I have... motivational problems
Granted, the things I learned by spending all of the time on the network make the core of my job today, and my major [not CS] was probably a poor choice to begin with. To sum up though, it depends on the sort of person you are. If you have an addictive personality, or have motivational problems, then an Internet connection will probably not benefit your education [though probably not your college experience]
When I started undergrad in 1986, one of the first things they made every student do was get their computing account and password. Even then, there were plenty of professors who insisted on contact via email, and most students I knew had at least one course where a significant portion of discussion was conducted online.
People spent incredible amounts of time on email and chat, with most people I knew checking their email from public kiosks, computing centers, or their home machines several times per day. The computer labs were major social centers; at a large one there would be several hundred people working on computers and another crowd, almost as large, just hanging around in the adjacent lobby.
I am not talking about the engineering school or compsci department; I was a humanities student.
I am therefore left to wonder if maybe the problem is your school, and if students there today might be just as "left-out" of current technological trends as you apparently were then.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I'm convinced that one of the problems we have is that we haven't changed fast enough to keep up with the r/evolutions in technology. When you mention "we have so much wisdom available and hardly any of it is going to be touched", I think it speaks loudly to that issue. I don't find that a pessimistic view, rather it's another in the many warning bells going off we should be listening to, but seldom do.
- Jack