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."

Comments

Not a surprise?

[Frisky070802]

RPI's not a huge surprise? I expected MIT at number one... not below the top 25. Same for many others. WTF?

Re:Not a surprise?

[MaestroRC]

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*.

What about most secured?

[TrollBridge]

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.