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America's Most Connected Campuses
foghorn666 writes "Forbes and the Princeton Review have posted their list of America's Most Connected Campuses, which measures the technological capabilities of the country's 357 top colleges and universities. They're looking at infrastructure stuff like whether wireless networks are available, if you can register for classes online, and so on - not really curriculum. But the results are interesting, and the winner not a huge surprise: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute."
RPI's not a huge surprise? I expected MIT at number one... not below the top 25. Same for many others. WTF?
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
That every year I hear the rankings of Top 10 party schools in Time, Newsweek, and other mainstream media outlets. I never hear a thing about campus rankings on issues that actually matter unless I turn to (relatively) obscure news sources like /.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
With as much emphasis as the survey put on wireless networking, I'd think good security would be one of the most important factors in a well-wired campus.
It's sad that something this high-profile apparently dismisses the importance of network security.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
I'm not surprised to see that Rutgers isn't even listed in the rankings. That school always was cheap when it came to technology spending. Even now the liabraries still have computer running Pentium I processors. For shame...
Free Desk
According to this article, Dartmoth has 12000 computers for 4000 students???
I teach at a good sized state university, and we were well ahead of the curve in being "wired" (we could easily answer "yes" to almost all the questions on the forbes survey). But I have colleagues who don't know how to use their computers. While there are attempts to train faculty and draw them more into the information age, there are still far too many (usually older) faculty members (and staff) who are out of touch technologically. Department pages are very slow to be updated on the web (if they exist at all), students freely plagiarize from online sources knowing their professor won't use google to catch them, and computer labs are cesspools of viral activity because the OS's aren't kept up to date.
What's worse, the university has bought into inflexible proprietary software solutions such as PeopleSoft, WebCT, and Blackboard to try to manage tasks which would be much better served by more flexible tools. I don't know as much about Peoplesoft (other than that I hate using it and it doesn't always work with my Mac), but my experience with the online teaching tools is that we would have been much better off with open source solutions like classweb, being developed at UCLA.
But of course it's a lot more difficult to measure such things on this sort of survey.
Do you think that the SS#s might have been the student ID #s? I remember a few years ago that a law was passed in NY requiring schools to NOT use SS#s as their student ID#s. Because of this RPI switched to another 9-digit number.
I'd initially blame the professor who posted the page because there are places to post them electronically that can only be accessed through a password/login. Then I'd blame the IT staff because posting names matched to ID#s is a violation of RPI's privacy policy.
RPI's network is fairly open because there are a lot of students there who try writing experimental programs (remember the Phynd controversy a few years ago? That was only one of 3 search engines at the time) on the network, and disallowing packets to/from certain ports would hinder a lot of these programs. I've gone to friends' campuses and found their networks to be much more restrictive, but also much slower than RPI's. RPI had 10 Mbps to ALL campus buildings and 100Mbps to a select few in 1999, not a bad accomplishment!
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
Because Troy sure is nicer than Princeton, and damn if I don't love having it snow during commencement ceremonies in May!
Never trust anyone over 90000.
Here's some survey questions that might have actually meant something for this survey:
- You asked if dorm rooms are networked and if there is a wireless network, but what is the bandwith of said connections?
- What is the bandwith of the pipes leading to the rest of the internet from the campus (i.e. Campuses on internet2 should get some kudos on this survey.)
- What is the average disk space provided for student accounts?
- What is the bandwith/download limit on student accounts hosted by the server? (It is not enough to just ask if each student can have a web page, if they are all extremely limited.)
- Is there a standardized setup (hardware or OS) everyone must have (if Yes, this is a mark AGAINST. Intelligent Campus IT departments can and should be able to handle the heterogenious network that best serves the students.)
- What percentage of the 1024 well-known service port numbers are firewalled off and thus impossible to use from student's connections? (A campus that has cable laid everywhere, but only allows web clients and nothing else is less connected than one that will let you get at the full range of services the internet provides.)
From the questions you see above, you can probably guess that when it comes to being more "connected", I am of the opinion that less policing equals more connected. The locked-down abilities should be the minimum that basic security will allow.
And if people running big servers from their dorm rooms is a concern, that should only be policed by tracking bandwith usage and responding when it is abused, NOT by just automatically making a particular protocol verbotten regardless of how much traffic a student is generating with it.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I have to call into question the accuracy of this survey. Under my campus, UC San Diego, they have 4 answers that should be yes marked as no: Is there a wireless network? Does the school provide Web pages? Does the school support handheld computers? Does the school stream audio or video of any courses? I know for a fact all these should be marked yes as I use the wireless network (which has been up for at least 4 years) daily with a PDA, have had classes which post audio & video copies of all lectures, and use the web space provided on one of the campus' Solaris servers for my personal web page.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.