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."

Comments

mudding

[mozkill]

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...

Course Web Sites

[rlowe69]

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.

I dropped out because of the web

[JimCricket]

I went to university from 1992-1996. I couldn't decide what I wanted to major in, so I didn't get a degree in that time. I quit school when it became obvious that the web was going to change everything. I had a sweet job offer at a software company and was all over it. Unlike many people who did this, I'm still gainfully employed. Now that the industry has settled down, I sometimes think about returning to finish my degree.

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.

Many thoughts

[Tyreth]

This question raises many other questions and interesting thoughts.

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.

Went to college in '75

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

My expierence

[fish_in_the_c]

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