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America's Most Connected Campuses

Posted by michael on from the disruptive-technologies dept.

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."

6 of 429 comments (clear)

  1. Not a surprise? by Frisky070802 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Not a surprise? by the+quick+brown+fox · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I believe there were some mistakes in the MIT data.

      Does the school provide Web pages?
      Can students register online?

      Both these answers were "No" according to the survey, but they should be "Yes".

    2. Re:Not a surprise? by qplnm · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And what about CMU? A few years back they were considered way up there, if not #1. T1 to all the dorms by my freshman year (1996), wireless at big chunks of campus in 99, hell we had a robot that roamed the halls freely and took commands issued via a web site.

      Perhaps in the past few years there has been less of a focus on technology than there used to be.

    3. Re:Not a surprise? by MaestroRC · · Score: 5, Interesting
      But still, there are gross inconsistencies with the data on there when compared to reality. For example, my university, The University of Tennessee at Knoxville, has the following:

      Is there a Wireless Network? (No)

      Well if our "nomad" network is not wireless, I don't know what is. And it's been around for about 7 years, starting out as a pre-802.11 network and then upgraded to 802.11b, and just this year upgraded to 802.11g.

      Does the school provide web pages? (No)

      Every student (rather, every person who has a valid NetID) can sign up for a free page and unix access. You just fill out a simple form and they send you the account info.

      Does the school stream audio or video of any courses? (No)

      We have a distance education program that streams audio out from a shitton of courses, including one of the classes I'm taking right now. I know this because it's annoying when something screws up and my professor has to take care of that rather than teaching me. And my freshman year they were streaming video online of my engineering fundamentals course, and storing it so we could review lectures later.

      Is a computer ethics policy in place for the school? (No)

      Then what is this?

      Do students have access to Usenet newsgroups? (No)

      Well, according to this, we've had usenet access since at least 1995, but I would venture a guess that we had it earlier, since our first network access was a government partnership with Oak Ridge National Labs.

      Does the school provide multimedia equipment? (No)

      Well, what about this? Or if they're thinking of in classrooms, almost every classroom has a projector and Smartboard (thing you can write on), and many have sound systems. In classrooms.

      Does the school offer courses in emerging technologies? (No)

      What the hell. You know, I think that that Internet2 Link we have, and all the related CS courses, including a project for a new file system structure for network storage is just for fun.

      Does the school stream its campus radio or TV stations? (No)
      Uhmmmm.... Try here. Damn these people either suck or we suck at reporting.


      And I know for a fact we have more than 1000 computers that are provided by the university for students to use. We have almost that many in the library *alone*.

      --
      I hate sigs...
  2. What about most secured? by TrollBridge · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  3. Re:Someone Think Of The Students... by commodoresloat · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Or, often more importantly, of the faculty.

    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.