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Switching a College from Desktops to Laptops?
tverbeek asks: "The college of art and design where I work is going to start switching next year from a labs-with-desktops approach to computers, to a students-with-laptops approach. The president appears to have made up his mind that we're doing it, so that's not really up for debate. We'll be starting by equipping all the full-time faculty this year, then next year start requiring (as in 'you can use financial aid to pay for it') each new student to buy a laptop that meets our specs (Apple or Dell, depending on major). Does anyone have experience with this kind of transition? What were the biggest complications?"
"How did you handle software licensing, especially for high-priced apps? How do you do software installs/upgrades? What do you do for resource-hungry apps (e.g. CAD, 3D rendering)? What about traditional lab configuration issues like anti-malware software, classroom restrictions on IM/P2P/network gaming, standard configuration options, etc. that would seem impossible to do with computers you don't own?
I know that many other colleges have done this sort of thing, but what about *art schools* or other colleges with high-end needs but mostly non-technical users, and where something like Photoshop is considered a 'core' application more than MS Office? Also, I'm especially interested in info about much more/less support staff the laptop approach requires; my intuition says that 1000 unsecured laptops will take more work to support than 300 locked-down desktops, but I need data."
I know that many other colleges have done this sort of thing, but what about *art schools* or other colleges with high-end needs but mostly non-technical users, and where something like Photoshop is considered a 'core' application more than MS Office? Also, I'm especially interested in info about much more/less support staff the laptop approach requires; my intuition says that 1000 unsecured laptops will take more work to support than 300 locked-down desktops, but I need data."
Set up a main server with all the software the students need. Then allow them to Remote Desktop in to use the server's resources for all those CPU-intensive tasks.
Let them buy their own copies of PS or whatever if they want to.
Better yet, quit now before the whole thing goes to hell. Find a nice cushy job in the industry rather than eke along in academia.
so I can avoid it.
Your homepage isn't working, or I'd check there first.
Nowadays many families buy their child a laptop before he or she has even finished the college application process. Why buy laptops for your students if it's something they are probably already going to have before arrival?
... what are you going to do with physical security? 1000 persons walking around with laptops is going to be sweet for any thief.
please excuse my apathy
You might check with your local law school. Many of them mandate laptop ownership for all students.
You're taking the intelligent route and making them pay for them on their own, though, so that's a step in the right direction.
Generally the feedback was students liked the mobility but hated being forced into buying a laptop.
Licenses weren't hard; they worked just like a normal lab environment, licensces are obtained from a central license server either on campus or a trusted facility of the software vendor.
As for the malware thing, in order for a laptop to get on the network, it had to prove it was up-to-date each time, and had to prove it was running university-approved, up-to-date anti-malware (provided free by the institute). This worked marginally well with only a few outbreaks.
The downside? Tech support, and lots of it. Students got confused, broke stuff, or generally got mad when things didn't work on the first try. The solution is a tech help desk, staffed by students or well-informed tech support people, where you can simply bring your laptop in and have it checked out by a "professional." That seems to clear up most of the problems.
Art students had little to no trouble, as they all bought macs. :)
I'm just guessing, but if you use a keyserver for those apps, is it possible to limit it to certain IP's? i.e. set it up so your 20 Matlab licenses only work in a given lab?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
... is slow harddrives in laptops.
Less Talk, More Beer.
This is a horrible idea. Crime in the area around my first college was bad, I'd hate to think what it would be like with _every_ student carrying several hundred dollars worth of pawnable hardware. I also see plenty of students incredibly pissed at having to allocate hundreds of dollars to a laptop that they need for food. Not to mention that it's a laptop that they, effectively, aren't going to have full control over what they run on.
Please, don't be so cheap.
Narrow it down to one laptop type, or better yet, a particular model, and offer a standard configuration for it, and only offer "official" support for that. Try to find a supplier that is willin g to offer the students discounts on it, since there will likely be a large number buying the "prefered" model. Otherwise, you better make sure that all of the apps you will require run on all the possible configurations that meet your spec. Good luck trying to support finicky applications accross different OSs'.
I go to Lawrence Technological University, and they have a Laptop Initiative. They have two sets of computer types: a compaq laptop for architect/sciences and a micron laptop for the engineers. Each Major type has their own 'Laptop Image' that loads the computer with the OS and programs. Since all the computers are the same they just image everything in the labs and hand them out to the students. Then the student is free to do what they wish with the computers. They have no locks on them what-so-ever. The programs on the computers are registered like corporations, and some of them require you to be on campus to use them (Matlab) because they have to contact the campus servers. As for upgrades, its up to the student. However, every two years the computers are returned to the help desk for the next set of images to be loaded. And if you bork your computer, you can just go down there and have them re-image it for you. Any physical damages have to be paid for though. You don't have to use a campus issued computer. If you have your own you can use it on their network, but will not be pre-registered on the domain or given any programs/support. The laptop initiative is very useful because it allows students and faculity to contact each other when ever needed. Our whole school is wireless with printers throughout the buildings, so presentations and class work can be done on them.
These are the types of issues that, in a well run institution, are resolved before any change of this scale is put through. The fact that the president of the school has mandated this without any sort of investigation into the ramifications is a sign that you should polish up your resume and start looking for a new job. Unresearched, unfunded mandates from the higher-ups are a sign that you're working in IT hell.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Some programs at the university I attend do this kind of thing already (fortunately, not my program). Specifications for one program of which I am aware require a specific Dell notebook with certain software, etc.
There are all kinds of issues with this approach. First, you lock students into a particular vendor. My university has this annoying tendency to do this all the time (let's start with soft drinks, i.e., the Coke-only contract we have here) because of financial incentives from the vendors for such monopolistic contracts. Frankly, these contracts should be illegal for a public university. I really don't care if it pays for a new scoreboard for the football stadium.
More specifically regarding computers, it forces students into unnecessary purchases. For example, say I have an HP laptop that meets all the technical requirements except for being a Dell. Why should I buy a new one? Well, because we have this requirement that you get a Dell because Dell computers are better... No, the requirement exists due to a contract with Dell, period. Never mind people such as myself who run a dual-boot system. I typically use the Debian side for everything and get by quite well. Rarely do I boot into WinXP -- the last time I did so was to read something off someone else's flash drive because I don't have support for it compiled into my kernel (I don't own one). The last time before that was at least two months before. I do my assignments in OpenOffice. Does it really matter? No.
Finally, I would add that at least at some universities, you can get aid for any computer purchase. Ours allows an increase in subsidized loan amount for one computer purchase per student per degree (basically, one every four years). I am unsure whether such an allowance is available only at the university's discretion or if it is available to all students receiving federal financial aid loans.
I know this isn't exactly the "data" that was desired, and I know that most students in your school probably are not wanting to run Linux on their laptops and don't care about anti-trust issues, so they would be quite happy with the university requirements. But, I think the arguments against such a requirement are rather logical.
-William Brendel
"... a laptop that meets our specs (Apple or Dell, depending on major)"
Never buy computer items before you check with Ed Foster's GripeLog. I get the impression from reading the issues concerning Dell that Dell is a company that should be avoided.
Note that the search above is restricted to Ed Foster's web site, and there are 16,300 hits.
My own personal experience with Dell is that the company is experiencing a social breakdown in which employees are working for themselves rather than for the company or the customers. Some of the things that I experienced from Dell have been more than disfunctional, they have been wacky.
I haven't been paying attention recently, but at one time Dell seemed to be competing with Microsoft to see who could be the most abusive. Sometimes Dell even won.
--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
Laptops WILL be lost/stolen/broken, no matter what you try to do. Give students the option to engrave their names and a phone number (somthing that dosn't change: mabye the lost-and-found dept.) in large, friendly letters on the cover. Provide insurance to users if they don't have it. Giving backup services and CPU power from a central server is a must. This means a large RAID array and blade servers (running Linux, of course). Even if all the above fail, provide short-term use laptops, that can--hpoefully--boot up from the backups previously made.
Also be sure to lay down wireless access points of all sorts. Put a printer attached to the network in in centralized places, probably in every room. Think of every possable problem.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
There are a lot of things to consider when making the switch, some of them fall on the administration side, and others on the hardware requirements in a laptop side.
The first thing comes to my mind is that for people who are going to be doing a lot of 3D modeling, CAD, photo editing, etc. having a computer with a decent resolution is a must. A lot of laptop screens max out at 1024x768 or 1280x1024. I've found that for a lot of applications, 1600x1200 is really the minimum comfortable resolution. Another big thing for moving to laptops for people doing artwork is that LCD screens show color differently than CRTs. LCDs are great for a lot of things, but CRTs really have better color accuracy which can matter. The biggest problem with LCDs though is that the brightness and contrast changes noticably with relatively minor movement. This usually isn't a big deal if you're just browsing slashdot or whatever, but it can make a huge impact when you're trying to balance colors or get the right brightness on an image (something that may looked "washed out" on a laptop could appear like a perfectly normal image on a CRT or on paper).
As for processing power, most laptops have plenty of power for doing graphics work, but many are low on RAM. It's also important to make sure that the machines have a decent video card. Many 3D applications will perform abysmally without 3D accelleration- or will refuse to install at all. You're not going to find any notebooks with a Quatro or anything in them, but look for systems with decent cards that have a good amount of video memory.
Hard drive space may be an issue for students working with video. This should be easily solved by suggesting or requiring students to buy a USB or Firewire 250+ GB hard drive. This way they can use the limited laptop storage space for what they are working on, and offload the rest of the storage to an external drive.
Hardware requirements aside, there are other things to consider. One of the biggest things is going to be backups. I would strongly suggest having a file server that is regularly backed up that students can upload work to so that they have an easy way to keep backups of files. Many people don't know how to back up, don't think about it, etc. The point is that if a student is going to fail a class or whatever because their hard drive crashed- it would be a reasonable idea for the school to at least offer students a centralized way to keep backups.
On the topic of hardware failures, I wouldn't completely do away with computer labs either. Stuff happens, and if some hardware goes bad/gets coffee spilled on it/gets run over by a stampede of elephants then students should still have some way to get work done.
Along with hardware considerations and considerations for hardware failure, it's important to remember that (especially if the student is required to buy their own laptop instead of being issued one owned by the school) the machines will NOT be treated like a lab computer. Students will install malware, get viruses, not run a firewall, and do every other thing imaginable to foul up the network. Some of this can be combated technologically- but it's important to remember that you will need policies to deal with these sorts of things. I seem to recall some statistic that said that in corporate networks the single largest way machines get infected is people bringing in laptops that are infected.
To summarize- make sure that system requirements for the systems are clearly stated. I would recommend students go for portable workstations as opposed to laptops for high end graphics stuff. Have a system in place so students can back up their work, and have some machines available for students to work on if their hardware gets hosed. Finally set in place usage policies that deal with the fact that you have machines owned by students on a network owned by the school. I'm certain there are more things to consider that other slashdotters will bring up- but I hope this has helped.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
My old high school gave everyone a laptop and it was horrible. They locked us down so tight all we could do is browse a few sites with IE and use MS Office. Everything was blocked including windows explorer. Let the students do what ever they want with them otherwise they will find ways around and you'll spend more time fighting students and enforcing rules then doing your job.
think "laptop theft insurance". :D
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I saw this idea tank and someone lost their job over it. This guy required new incoming MBA's to have new laptops, not to mention they required exact models for support reasons. Some students REALLY resented buying a new one. Then it got better. Some of the faculty would not allow laptops in their class. This resulted in some students leaving the computer at home while others brought theirs to school. So then the ones who left their computer at home started trying to use the computers of the students who brought them. This created hate and discontent. It also created a new position to fill when the staff member was told to find a new job.
What I found when the university I was working for contemplated a laptop requirement was that the labs were going to stay. The laptops work great for general purpose stuff like Office and even Photoshop. But the heavy duty CAD and engineering software was a no go. Firstly, a 15 inch screen just isn't adequate for working on a large 3D model in Pro/E. Our labs had 21" standard. Some vendors wouldn't compromise on licensing either so that ruled them out. We also had a number of apps that were specific to either Windows or Unix (Solaris mostly - this was about 6 years ago and we were just getting serious about Linux). And lastly, the powers that be decided that it wouldn't be fair to the students to have them buy a new laptop halfway through their studies to stay current. That meant that when they were seniors - when they really needed to do actual work - that they would be trying to run their simulations on 4 or 5 year old hardware. And so, the labs stayed. Which was a good thing, since my job at the time revolved around running them.
bance.net
http://www.keyserver.com.au/
Key all your apps before you hand them out. The then won't run without being able to talk to the KeyServer. Users can also check out keys for a period of time if they're giong to be off the network.
Make sure they have a real video card as a minimum maybe duel core as well.
Security is a big problem for laptops. Most places use a keyed or combination lock attached to the Universal Security Slot (USS) on the laptop (or projector, or anything else with one, for that matter.) Most of the laptops that I've seen are very weak in the USS's attachment to the laptop body. For example, at my uni they use Dell Latitude D800 (or something) and the USS is right by a fitting between two plastic pieces of body. That's about 1/8 inch of soft plastic that has to be twisted out to steal a laptop from a cart. I wish they would connect the slot to a stong internal metal structure, but who am I to advise Dell on practical security?
The subsidized loan for a computer is something offered by the federal financial aid people. I know this because I was offered it at all three universities I have attended (problems with faculty at one, another didn't have the program I wanted, and eventually graduated with a degree that wasn't exactly what I wanted from the third).
When I went to school not too long ago it only subsidized like $500 if that when the lowest end PC you could find was about $700.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
Ask Slashdot? Are you serious? There are much better resources out there that are much more appropriate and useful. EDUCAUSE and SIGUCCS spring to mind immediately. There are probably other local or more specialized organizations of which your institution is already a member.
How about doing some research, identifying some institutions who have mandatory laptop programs, and giving them a call or sending them e-mail? I've NEVER had an institution refuse to help me, answer my questions, or pass on their experiences and suggestions (but the real trick lies in finding the right person to contact - THAT can be difficult or even impossible).
To add some real content to my post: I interviewed with an institution in the north a few months ago for a position managing their mandatory laptop program. They contract with the manufacturer to provide on-site support. They also have a very close relationship with the manufacturer - the head rep was a part of the interview team and the closeness between the rep and the other "regular" university employees was apparent. The program appears to be very successful due in large part to their very close, positive relationship. Shoot me an e-mail (thekevbo1 at yahoo.com) if you'd like to dig up some more specific information.
we are considering a laptop requirement at the school i work at. our student population is over 90% female (social work) and many have trouble lugging around a laptop along with books, water, cell phone, etc. this is aggravated by the fact that most students don't have much to spend and try to get the fastest machine they can afford. this usually means something heavy too. another consideration is the fact that even if they all have wireless and you have solid wifi coverage, they will need power. if they will be in class, you will want power at every seat, which will cost a lot to do. you will also need to figure out a decent printing solution. what happens when the student forgets their laptop, or it's broken? i think the trend towards laptops will increase, but you can't do away with labs just yet. i am advocating recommending laptops, and as more students use laptops, we reduce the number of computers in the lab.
Next year I will be heading off to college, hopefully, and I was wondering what people thoughts are on what laptop I should try to get. I have an alright budget, I do not want to spend that much but my parents will also spend some on it. Thanks for any input.
I don't work at a college but when young adults enter college they have to assume a lot of respnsibility. Don't take it away from them, they need to learn this stuff too, and don't go half assed, buy into it - this is an important change here.
So treat these as hypothetical (since you posted on Slashdot, expect a lot of these to be purely hypothetical)
How did you handle software licensing, especially for high-priced apps?
- a) They are called acedemic versions, or acdemic licensing, talk to your college bookstore.
- b) Tell Microsoft, Adobe, Etc. you are going to specify Linux and FOSS apps because of the high costs involved.... Or actually specify Linux because of the high costs involved. Keep this decision maker informed of this stuff (especially costs and logistics), keep them well in the loop.
How do you do software installs/upgrades?
What do you do for resource-hungry apps (e.g. CAD, 3D rendering)?
- That's where you specify the the "minimum system requirements" in the printed pre-registration materials and you attach those laptop requiring college decision makers names to it if students have issues with it.
What about traditional lab configuration issues like anti-malware software, classroom restrictions on IM/P2P/network gaming, standard configuration options, etc. that would seem impossible to do with computers you don't own?
- Specify in the software requirements, make an installer CD of reccomended (freeware or bulk licensed) apps.
- Lock down your servers (use Linux, or something non-vulnerable, scan EVERYTHING, put up multiple firewalls and IP filters), anything you institite that is dpendednt solely on the students would be just foolhardy.
- Put a disclaimer that the college is not responsible for them failing because they caught something on thier computer from outside the school servers as they are responsible for attending class they are responsible for completing assignments and operation of their own computer. (And don't set yourself up for failure by trying to fix all thier self-induced problems all the time, only what is created from your side, that will keep you busy enough)
I know that many other colleges have done this sort of thing, but what about *art schools* or other colleges with high-end needs but mostly non-technical users, and where something like Photoshop is considered a 'core' application more than MS Office?
- Sorry to break it to you but to require the students have their own laptops puts "technical-skills" on the student's requirements, either as prerequisite or learn as you go. Again, don't hold thier hand on this. Especially if they are takijng courses in something like Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. They still have to manage thier files, it's not like paper and charcoal (well actually it is, even with that you need to keep your paper clean and your charcoal pencils tidy, sharp and in usable lengths.) Maybe have more introduction to computers courses for the noobs to start off with.
Also, I'm especially interested in info about much more/less support staff the laptop approach requires; my intuition says that 1000 unsecured laptops will take more work to support than 300 locked-down desktops, but I need data.
- You are going to need a bunch of security guys and sysadmins and at least one with good programming skills to help rewsolve/fix flaws in school systems.
- Since laptops are very stealable you will have to think about on campus theft/liability issues as well.
- It depends on how you plan to handle it:
* First priority is managing the fact that 1000 potentially unsecured systems will be accessing your internal systems and making sure it's going to withstand that.
* Second as you will have many people with different configurations, Make the systems as platform independent as possible, web based (not requiring IE or some other dead-end platform specific application or codec) this will elimiate a lot of (why donesn't X run on my computer. If you get it generic enough then you
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Maybe you need to rethink your goals?
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
University of Michigan Art School
http://art-design.umich.edu/it/laptop.html
Northern Michigan University
http://www.nmu.edu/academics/tlc.htm
I was directly involved in the distribution process at one school. I didn't think it would work, but it did.
To address some of the comments from other posts:
-Most freshmen are buying laptops anyway. These programs provide a structured method for all incoming students to buy a machine that meets their needs. They are informed well in advance so they don't go off and buy a different machine.
-People complain, but it all works out in the end. Some don't like the vendor/price/model/etc. but it's just one more thing about college to complain about.
-IBM and Apple are the best companies to get machines from. They are reliable and have good support systems in place
-Computers are a part of life for any college student. So long as financial aid considers it part of the base expense, it isn't a hardship for anyone.
-Theft is a problem whether all students have the same laptop or not. You have to take the same steps (documenting MAC Addresses, having system passwords, using a physical lock) as you would with any notebook
To answer some of the original questions:
-For software, contact each vendor and they will usually work out a good educational license deal for each machine (No server/key setup). You can cite the above schools' programs.
-Make sure the machines have adequate RAM for the job. Get RAM from a 3rd party if the laptop company won't give you a good deal. Get small, fast HDs rather than huge slow ones. Uses external 3.5" drives for backup
-Make antivirus/antispyware part of the base load/image. Have all updates automatic
-Port block and track IP/MAC addresses for bandwidth usages. Have graduated punishments for connection misuse
-Use a student staff for technical/question support. They are cheaper and more knowledgable that trying to train middleaged staff. Use a mixture of students and fulltime staff for physical support issues. You can't trust kids to do all the warranty work by themselves.
Good luck!
As a sophomore in the electrical engineering curriculum at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, I cannot tell you how amazing it has been for me to have my own laptop. Sure it's expensive, but tack it on the the total expense, and it doesn't mean anything. Like you said, art school. Well I don't have any tips there, but I'll say for sure that when I need to have high end performance AND portability, my laptop is amazing. The school picks out a "freshman laptop" each year that the next incoming class will be required to purchase. We have licensing through several top names, including MS Office, AutoCad, Matlab, Maple, Mathcad, AutoCad, Cadence/PSPice, and so forth. I don't know about the artistic approach, but I know for sure I have no regrets whatsoever with my school requiring my computer.
-Gareth
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Terre Haute, IN
There are way too many problems to deal with if a classroom is going to be electronic with the students' laptops being brought in.
The only way around it is to lock down the machines severely as is done with the junior high and high school programs. That's not an ideal solution.
Classrooms with dedicated computers are the best solution! Every classroom should have computers (not bulky towers and 21" CRTs), a projector, a sound system, etc.
We recently switched to tablet computers. This transition went over easily enough. (you can read more here http://admissions.dsu.edu/ftr/article/tabletpc.asp )
i think the biggest problem we have run into has been the help desk/repair station.
our campus isnt too big so we only have about 5 people working in this area.
While we're on this topic, I'd like to get some /.ers feedback... /.ers think? Is the paperless learning environment a good idea? What problems should we anticipate? What should we do to make the whole setup as effective as possible? Money isn't really an issue as we have several benefactors in support of the idea.
My highschool is transitioning over the 1 or 2 years to a "paperless" environment. All of the students will have their own Apple laptops, and all of the books will be in a digital format and will be supplemented w/ internet curriculum. I'm a student, and while I think this sounds cool, it seems like it might be a bit of a pipe dream (especially when our school administration is about as receptive to the internet as the People's Republic of China... no MySpace, no Facebook, etc.). But nevertheless, the school administration is insistant on this migration. As one of the obvious "computer enthusiasts" in the school, I've had a lot of faculty members/parents ask me for my opinion on the whole plan, and my only response has been "I don't know if this is gonna work." What do my fellow
You're going to increase total costs ten fold, just to save a little on the school's side. If you need money, increase tuition $100 instead of requiring each student to buy a $1000 laptop. Also, if you go forward with the plan, you might find a lot of students who will strongly disagree with whatever specs you might dictate, especially if there's specific software required. For example, if you require Windows+MSOffice, you'll piss off Linux and Mac users.
"Convertible" laptops.. like the gateways or toshibas are phenomenal. I just purchased a Toshiba M4. You get all the benefits of a laptop, combined with a TabletPC. It's great for normal dev-work, but kicks ass when I flip it to draw.
Simple. Provide everyone with a firearm as well...
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
The biggest problem you will have to deal with is two years down the road, when many of your students have dead batteries, and the only batteries available for their machines may be two year old, degraded stock. Schools need to use their leverage, with high volume purchases, to get the vendors to guarantee availability of fresh, new stock battery packs, at fair prices, for at least four years.
(Apple or Dell, depending on major)
I hope the engineering students get the Apple. And the business majors. And the literature majors. Come to think of it, I hope everyone gets the Apple.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
My university has this annoying tendency to do this all the time (let's start with soft drinks, i.e., the Coke-only contract we have here) because of financial incentives from the vendors for such monopolistic contracts.
How does that work? Are all the places that sell soft-drink owned & managed by the University, or does the Uni change the contracts for rent etc. that the managers of the various businesses on campus need to agree to if they want to remain in business there. If the latter, how do they manage that? It seems in the Land of the Free (which I assume you come from) that would be illegal somehow.
Look out!
But look above, I emphasize "addition" for a reason. They are not a replacement for true computing labs with high performance hardware and licensed software, especially since the colledge/university does not own OR maintain the systems. Yes, they are great from the standpoint that they will reduce your out of pocket costs of maintaining a lab full of high end computers, since the school no longer needs to support that infrastructure, but they are simply moving the costs around. The costs will now move to the students and IT help centers because you no longer have the ability to roll out massive patch sets, automate software installations, upgrades, or security patches. Now you are relying on students to keep their systems running properly, and most if not all of those students can bairly tell you the difference between a Mac or an IBM, let alone be expected to be able to patch their system or configure it to connect to your networks securely. The overhead for fixing these systems will easilly overwhelm your current IT department if they are the ones expected to handle the problems that crop up.
Let us not even get into the issues with software such as photoshop licenses, since you are now no longer in control of the license due to the student being the owner of the computer. You will effectively be requiring the students to need to purchase a full license of photoshop or AutoCAD or Mathmatica for their own use since there will no longer be any school operated systems which they can gain access to the programs. This is adding several thousands of dollars of cost burden onto all students, many of who may decide that they do not like graphics art and change to become an english major or some other major that will never use a full version of photoshop, which means they just wasted all that money.
There are many schools that have embraced laptops, but they are an addition to the rest of their computing systems. My college converted at least 3 major computer labs from your standard desktop setups to hot stations for use with student owned laptops. BUT they still kept very close to the same number of desktop systems throughout the campus, basically moving the desktops to smaller new labs. The students mostly purchased laptops on their own because the entire campus had wireless connectivity which made it easy to just bring the laptop to class and take your notes, etc., on it and work on assignments between class. But when things required true horsepower, they used the regular computer labs or a regular home desktop system to do the work. The laptops were and still are a convience system, not a real replacement for true dedicated computing labs.
So I personnally would try to convince they person who has this hairbrained idea in his or her head that it isn't going to fly for reason X, Y, and Z, or go job hunting because when the stuff starts hitting the fan it will be blowing in the direction of the IT department staff who doesn't have the power or ability to fix the problems generated on systems they do not own, but will be blaimed by the students because the students can not get their assignments completed on their laptops...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
My alma-mater, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, has included laptop purchase (and insurance!) in the tuition of every incoming freshman since 1995. I was in the 3rd class that required laptops, and by then they had a well-oiled system for dealing with most of the issues you mentioned: A service window for laptops, to quickly deal with reimaging, replacing hard drives, screens, keyboards, etc. Each year students got update CD's produced by the school containing all site-licensed software, OS installs, drivers, etc. that you would need to reimage a laptop on your own once you messed it up beyond repair. The union and cafeteria have lockers specifically for securing laptops.
Their laptop page here has a lot of good information about how they run the program.
When I was there, security was limited to local anti-virus installs; no restrictions were put on what software you installed, what internet ports you used, etc. At the end of the day, the laptop is the student's property and its proper operation really only affects the student's ability to do his or her school work. As opposed to lab machines, where one student can hose it and the school has to clean it up so that others may use it, the student-owned laptop model shifts responsibility for responsible use to the student. If the student has to go a week without his laptop because he let the gator installer run, that's his problem and only he will suffer.
And I was stupid enough to actually buy one because I was told by the admissions people it would be a vital part of class. Number of classes where I was required to use my laptop? None.
This kind of thing sounds great to college admissions people, but it doesn't really work out how they think it will. The biggest problem I think you'll face is likely getting the teachers to actually make use of the laptops. It might not be as big a problem at an art/design school (you actually HAVE to use computers for some of that stuff) but at a regular old liberal-arts college, the laptop requirement still doesn't make much sense. As for models--Dell consistently sold a crappy, low-spec laptop to Longwood students (my college) that was WAY overpriced. My first year it was something like a Pentium II 300 with no burner; I turned around and bought a gateway laptop for less that had at least 200 mhz and a burner on that POS. Dell seems to make the most of their guaranteed sales like that by selling the lowest-spec machine they can get away with.
You may want to contact the Air Force Academy. They were requiring that all students purchase a computer since at least the days of the 486. Back in the early 90s when I was still dreaming of going there, they were talking only about desktops. I'm sure they have evolved their computer requirements since then. You may want to check with the other military academies as well.
As powerful as laptops are getting they still are good enough to run resource hungry applications (CAD, FEA, rendering, etc.)
Desktops and servers are needed for such things. Even having a horde of iron in the backroom for them to use won't necessarily solve things. Most people seem to have problems understanding how to use servers. Then again most of my servers are unix/linux and most people get precious little training in that area.
As an IT person for a university I deal with this all day every day. I wouldn't dump everyone to laptops because they wouldn't be able to run everything they need to on them.
As someone wrote above, get out while you retain your sanity. Your president just made life a living hell and unless you are a bastard operator you better get out.
College and it's peripherals cost money?? -sarcasm-
The idea behind it is that there is always the needed resources for students to get the most out of their educations. However, most usage of the laptops in the classroom is used for the instant messaging app of your choice.
As far as managing this from a support side: I know there are specific images for different degree's (i.e. Engineering degrees would get AutoCAD, etc. While business students would not.) I am not sure how the licenses are managed but I know people with expensive licensed software MUST get a factory image before receiving a diploma.
More reading --> http://www.msoe.edu/notebook/
My college (Wentworth Institute of Technology) has already done this starting this year. I have to say, I love my laptop. They're pretty beefy too (1.86ghz Pentium M, 1gig ram, firegl v3200). In fact, my only complaint is the damn cpu can get over 70C when gaming; I have to undervolt and underclock. Disaster is far from what I'd describe it. Now, it comes with anti spyware/virus shit, and our college firewall is pretty much in lockdown mode (no ports open, etc). Plus, its a tech school with CS and IT majors, so I imagine we might be somewhat more capable of dealing with problems than an art school. Although our art majors were given G4s. It can (and here, has) been done with few problems.
Most of the top-ranked engineering programs in the United States have been like this for a few years at least. Desktop computer labs are a rarity on campus, and they're only used for super-expensive engineering applications or instrument-control computers. Laptops are the new desktops. Don't fight it.
1. Computer labs are cheaper in the long run than laptops, especially in terms of licenses. If you use pretty much any program that has a heavy fee, (SPSS, for example, although I imagine that's not a huge concern at an art college) then uh, you're pretty much literally restricted in what you can teach students from that point forward-- it's literally like taking a step back ten years. If you can't find a way around this problem the program is significantly damaged.
2. If you restrict what students can do with this laptop that you're making them pay for, well, you're essentially stealing in excess of a thousand dollars from each student. This is more of a concern if you're a private than a public; if you're a private, well, you could be boned if you're expecting them to give you money as alumni.
Search around on Rose-Hullman's website for a sys admin's email address, or just call them. They've been doing this since the mid-90s.
A couple of suggestions off the top of my head:
1. Get in touch with Dell and look for volume discounts on the machines AND service contracts. You WILL need the service contracts. RH had student techs do minor repairs, but my experience with Dell on-site tells me you're better off outsourcing.
2. Get a volume license agreement in place with all the software vendors that your institution's courses will require. This means you'll need to get on the ball quickly, as you'll first need to inventory what software students will need. Academic licensing in volume is very cost effective.
3. Don't join the laptops to a Windows domain. It gives worms and such too much reach if you don't lock down file shares properly. This also means you can XP Home Edition, saving some cost. Make sure all of your applications are compatible with Home Edition, of course.
4. Look into Samba for network file shares. Make sure you plan for setting up this on each client in an automated fashion. Photoshop makes big files, and your students will want to share them. Keep that in mind.
5. Don't use 802.11b. If memory serves, the slowest connection to an access point effectively throttles all connections to that AP.
6. Enable MAC address filtering on all of your access points. Managing this effectively will require a lot of organization and planning up front.
Anyway, these are some things to think about. Get in touch with some folks who manage this stuff.
I work with the technology department at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana. We require every new student to buy a laptop - each year gets the same kind. The tech support system required to support the laptops is pretty serious. We have between 5 and 7 full-time employees working year-round with the laptops, as well as about a dozen part-time student workers during the year to deal with the day-to-day maintenence of the laptops.
Your first move should be to find yourself a few certified laptop technicians for your brand of laptop. Every computer breaks. Laptops break more often. Students break computers more often. The number of problems you'll encounter will, I expect, vastly exceed the predictions of the manufacturer.
Aaaaahhhhhhh this post hurt my brain so much!
The college of art and design where I work is going to start switching next year from a labs-with-desktops approach to computers, to a students-with-laptops approach.
Couldn't you scroll up and read that?? Did you just miss the whole... everything? I'm gonna type this very slowly:
labs-with-desktops vs. students-with-laptops
Ok, so the submitter has used a form of parallelism here, where "students" takes the place of "labs" and "laptops" takes the place of "desktops."
Why... what... how...
It's not like it was first post or something superawesomesweet like that, why didn't you have enough time to re-RTFAS, or at least fix up the random and awful typos you made (while taking the time to explain that you didn't want to spend 12 seconds using the Dictionary.com search bar in the top corner of Firefox)?
And what huge company is that? I am no longer worried about my employment prospects, somebody will surely take me.
Also, why in hell would someone decide to set up labs with laptops? Easier to steal, worse performance, more expense, insanely more difficult to upgrade... sounds like a description of my dream setup. And why would the question have been asked, if the lab model of computing environments were still being used?
This is maybe a little much, but... wow. I really wonder why you posted at all.
Here in Mexico, we have only 4 majors, two of them requiring Windows, for autocad and stuff, and then there are design and cinematography, which use mac. You don't really need a $3000 17" Powerbook, or even a 12 one, most of them seem to work ok with a 14" iBook. Licensing is done directly with microsoft/adobe/apple. The sweet thing, is that for the really tough stuff, you work best on editing rooms, one person rooms that hold top of the line computers, because, in the case of film, you cant go around carrying tapes, sound mixers and a final cut pro license on your back all the time, because you don't need it 24/7. On the support issue, it's best if you actually contract with a dealer that sells the machine through your school, and let them handle all of the support requests. First years won't require state of the art powerbooks, but eventually, and mostly because that will be your life, you'll buy one that more than suits your needs.
On the PC side, people just thrash their computers regularly in this field, because the computer won't keep up with the demands, so here we have a 2 year renovation contract, in which you pay a monthly fee (around $80) and at the end of the 2-year term, the computer is exchanged for a new one, and better one.
Regarding security, both phisical and virtual you might want to have a tight control on serial numbers of the machines and regular update seasons, in which laptops are brought back for an antivirus check and software update, though most people catch up with it. It's a big investment you are making in having a laptop, so you generally take care of it by updating your software and antivirus.
Working without desktops has worked really great here, with about 500 students, and more to come during following semesters, and it's actually weird to see how the remaining computer labs are empty most of the time. Then again, if most students can't afford a computer, then they might start off by choosing a career that isn't that tech-savvy, given that art studios, and most of the other design workplaces demand a keep-up with tech, and I don't see that going away anytime soon.
At the school I reside at our masters programs must buy laptops and uses them for classes and test via wifi. The biggest items are malware and what programs u must allow to be installed, otherwise students will install everything.
couple of programs to look into
Faronics Anti-Executable
Secure-Brower
good luck
Hmmm, that looks good but it's wrong on every level in this case. I don't know about you, but I like a leader who does not micromanage. Planning is good, but the kind of things you ask for don't exist outside of free software and even there choice is provided. I was more bothered that specific brand names were provided than I was about lack of planning to fill the "specs" someone came up with. Choice is key in academic settings.
Providing applications to students is something non free software has long failed to consider. LSU recently introduced an "environment of abundance" model where some applications were paid for with student fees. Most Microsoft users hated it because it mostly provides them with a chance to pay for the software that came with their laptop to begin with. Other applications required keys and were as clumsy as non free software always is. It does provide a sort of monoculture in anti-virus, but the campus networks remain polluted with all sorts of Microsoft born ills anyway. Local mirrors of free software are also being funded, but most of them were already there and the Microsoft "server" dishing out the applications does not do a very good job of categorizing free software applications by purpose.
For the most part, you don't know what answers the institution has already come up with. It would have been nice for links to such stuff, but it looks like the asker did not wish the institution to be identified. One thing is for sure, no funding further funding is required if the students are forced to pay for everything as the questioner implied.
"Quit Now" is not going to help anyone here. The only suspicious thing is the, "Dude, you're buying a Dell" note. If the specs the IT staff came up with is it has to M$ du jour, it might be time to look around. Reasonable hardware specs include processor speed equivalents and memory.
When it comes to actual teaching, reasonable assignments do not specify what tool only what has to be accomplished. The only time it's reasonable for a professor to specify a specific application is when the application is provided in the lab the class is taught in.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Unless you're just teaching the basic functionality, the color rendition of the laptop LCD screen is inadequate for Photoshop.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
Instead of 1000 users with limited accounts you've suddenly got 1000 administrators doing god knows what to their machines in their spare time, so I would be locking down as much as possible to ensure a user can do very little.
It's more dangerous than a workplace because students are (in my opinion) more likely to mess around with their computers and casually browse sites employees would avoid while at work.
You should make sure your firewall is blocking every non-required port, because you'll have x0% of students running around with torrents and other p2p software.
I would expect some users would establish their own p2p network on campus, specifically to share music and whatever else they download, so I'd look at throttling their bandwidth on the network.
Packman offers a good alternative to locking down students' computers or even requiring a standard PC/laptop that everyone has to buy. Basically, the tool allows administrators to put a set of standard applications on a server, and performs idiot-proof internet-based installation of those applications on the students' computers.
Student Perspective-> I go to a school where the laptop program is required to enroll. At first glance, the extra cost sucks.. Each quarter involves paying a fee of $360 for the use of the laptop and the installed software. The program works so that after the first two years, you return the laptop and receive a new one which you will be given for *free* after you graduate, if you graduate. All in all, you end up paying: $360 * 3 trimesters * 4 years of school = $4320 Given the fact(s) that: 1) classes don't have to obtain lab time 2) laptops all contain standard software and no one has to hunt around installing new things and wasting time in class 3) professors can *expect* the software is there and plan lessons around it 4) the laptops are not locked down in any way 5) complete accidental damage coverage is provided (including beer soaked laptops) The laptop program is actually a good deal. Plus, upon graduation you can quickly recover at least half of the costs of the laptop. Administrator Perspective -> At one point I worked for the school building the images and cloning to multiple laptops. The way we separate the images is by clumping the majors that are most likely to use specific software together, and sort out liscencing after. It is an engineering university and the laptops that are provided are usually top of the line models that cost around the price point of $4500, with a return from HP of $500 for any laptops failing to be associated with a graduating student. The liscencing we do here involves thousands of dollars of programs installed on each laptop, again, sorted by major. The Architectural / Mechanical engineers may need SolidWorks, so it is installed. The liscencing is taken care of through liscence servers. All the majors are provided MatLab and general electric circuit analysis tools. Administering 1000 laptops vs. 300 desktops will definitely be a larger task. Without a good place for the students to go to get their laptops repaired, no questions asked, the program will fail. Expenses aimed at making the student pay for every repair or damage to the laptop make them angry and unwilling to participate. The only thing my school does not cover is a stolen laptop, but a deductable of $800 still shields the student for the full cost (As long as there is a police report). Overall, if the latops are good enough desktop replacements, the software is available and not costly to the student, and there is a service center on campus providing decent customer support, then the desktopless environment for school is an excellent choice no matter what the concentration.
For $1600 CDN I could definately get better and acedemic versions of Visual Studio, J Builder, etc. But they made it manditory. You were not able to register without payment for the laptop. This is what the College told us we were paying for
Now feeling ripped off I weighed some of the costs
Now looking at all of this it is my personal belief that at the end of the day this school unjustly took money from me for massive financial profit. Don't let your school get away with it the same mine did make sure you get your money's worth.
At Milwaukee School of Engineering, we've had this program for about the last decade. Theres maybe one small computer lab for harley davidson in the whole campus. It allows for the small school to have updated technology and the students can take any work they have in and out of the class room.
As far as increase in tuition, I believe that it is roughly 2k a year extra, which includes all printing, internet, software, and tech fees. Students get business class laptops for not too much money. You maintain the laptop for 2 years, then trade it in, and at the end of your 4th year, you keep the laptop. I think this is probably the greatest program in existence.
As for the malware thing, in order for a laptop to get on the network, it had to prove it was up-to-date each time, and had to prove it was running university-approved, up-to-date anti-malware (provided free by the institute). This worked marginally well with only a few outbreaks.
Oh please, Mr. Spirit, provide us with a link to such a dissaster. I can't believe it.
Art students had little to no trouble, as they all bought macs. :)
How the heck does that work? What does your little system think of Debian, which is more secure and less trouble that either of the above? What do visitors do? Who's software makes the check? If it's M$, aren't you afraid they will be up to their usual anti-competitive tricks?
up-to-date anti-malware (provided free by the institute).
You might check to see if you are not paying for this "service" through tech fees. Few anti-virus writers give their product away. The Microsoft shills and reps at my University are socking it to students at $150/year and calling it "free".
This worked marginally well with only a few outbreaks.
I'd consider that a failure, but others have lower expectations. If it is only a marginal success, why recommend it to others?
The downside? Tech support, and lots of it. Students got confused, broke stuff, or generally got mad when things didn't work on the first try.
Now that, I can believe. Everyone pays for Bill Gate's failures everyday. Why not just use software that works?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I was looking into this last year and found this site.
http://www.wcmo.edu/wc_users/homepages/staff/browIt has a pretty extensive list of colleges and universities that have made the switch (and in some cases, switched back). I'm sure one or two would be willing to share their experience with you.
My school made the switch the year after I left. In talking with my advisor, she mentioned IM as a means of both cheating and distraction had become a pretty serious issue for profs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The only challenge is that programs patched by keyserve won't work with regular software updates. The administrator has to patch his copy of photoshop or whatever and generate a whole new keyserved version for the populous to download. A real pain in the neck, and you would probably have to hire at least .5 FTE to manage just that system. Its cheaper than thousands of photoshop and final cut licenses though.
I've worked on a lot of networks as a private contractor, and as a direct employee from operator level to executive level. By far the most frightening thing to me was a recent contract I worked on where an entire company wanted laptops and only laptops.
A lot of things have changed since I worked that contract, but one thing I would advise would be to focus on recovery rather than prevention. These students will break their laptops, they will get stolen, they will get damaged in ways you will never forget.
Secure your network from the students, and work towards easy restoration of data.
I would also advise that your school try to find an insurer willing to insure individual laptops against accidental loss, theft, and damage. If they purchase their machine from Dell they can get most of that.
For backups, I would advise students to setup their email to leave copies of all messages on the mail server -- and keep their local mail storage files off of the backup list. This is very cumbersome, and overall is the most annoying thing to deal with on backups. My personal mailbox has over 7,000 messages and it takes me less than a second to connect and check my mail when there is just a message or two that is new - so aside from the mail server itself there is no real additional load by doing this - and it allows the student to recover their mail easily.
Don't bother scripting profile backups - they rarely work and are more difficult to manage then simply recreating a users profile. Instead, focus on making the users profile settings part of your recovery process, with an emphasis on proper documentation procedures.
Find out who your local dell contractor is. Dell has contractors just about everywhere - you can bet there is atleast one near you. Find out who they are and open a line of communication. Let them know what is going on, and what your future purchase plans look like. I imagine this fellow will enjoy hearing from you.
Most importantly, keep excellent documentation of everything you do. Every complaint a sudent makes, every phone call, every change you make, everything. Don't wait until five minutes later, or the next day, document it right on the spot and date/time stamp it. It has been my experience that when users own a PC that you are given minor responsibilities over -- the users seem to think any problem = your problem. Eventually that works it's way up administration and next thing you know you're pulling your hair out. This way when some student with a family member who's friends with administration level faculty -- you've got the data to backup your position when you're in that drab office being asked questions like your a first year intern that cheated his way through school.
Also, I'd keep my resume fresh and an eye on oppertunities in my area. Just in case such a major shift in your work environment changes your outlook on the position.
Dealing with a network full of laptops has it's challenges, but it can also be fun. But it's not for everyone.
Why not go to one of the key players? IBM is one of the stronger firms with experience in higher ed:
IBM's K-12: http://www-03.ibm.com/industries/ca/en/education/
And higher education: http://www-03.ibm.com/learning/ca/en/highered/
Case Study Archive: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf
Specifics on Acadia from wikipedia (just FYI)
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Make sure you communicate to the students the importance of backing up their school work. Laptop hard drives are more prone to failure than desktop hard drives. It is devastating to loose all your school work. Hard out pamphlets explaining how to burn their work to CD-ROM.
I go to http://rpi.edu/ and we require students to have a computer. We have a deal with IBM and all students get a deal and are encouraged to purchase the same laptop through the school. This means all the hardware is the same, and it is all undder the same warranty. We have a repair shop here at school, that is authorized to do most repairs on warranty. We also ship them with a standard software package of educational liscences. As far as some software(Solidworks CAD) there is a license server so taht to use it you must have a network connection and be on campus(or VPN in). Thsi works very well, and the theft rate is not too high. They all come with security cables, and if you don't use them they do get stolen, but it doesnt happen TOO often.
I also worked for the Humanities and Social Sciences Department here, as a Systems Administrator and we dealt with giving faculty software on their laptops(the school's doesnt come with adobe). We use sassafrass to key out adobe cs, macromedia and other arts type applications. just about anything can be keyed, mac and pc alike.
What is the point in forcing students to buy laptops? I can see that if the school is going to close their computer labs it might be somewhat reasonable to force the purchasing of a computer (though a few years ago when I was in college a lot of people used their roommates). Frankly, I don't see the need to use a laptop. Teachers either give handouts of their powerpoint presentations and it tends to be easier to write than type notes (tho not always). I wouldn't want to have to input my organic chemistry or calculus notes into a computer. It's way easier to write them in a notebook.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
At my district we gave a good portion of teachers laptops. We discovered that a large percentage of the laptops were in some state of expensive disarray within 18 months. Laptops are expensive to repair, new screen $400 if you find it used. No option to upgrade, just replace. I don't suggest doing it.
You really should not force a particular brand of computer or operating system upon your students, especially if the students are paying for the computer with their own source of funding. It would be understandable if you stated students needed a computer...period. But some individuals may require a specific computer or configuration because of an accessibility need. You may be 'specing' out Dell laptops and Apple iBooks while some individual with a vision impairment need a larger display, or another user needs specific screen reading software for audio impairment, or another user needs a Braille keyboard, etc, etc. At some point, bureaucrats need to stop thinking they can determine what is best for everyone, and let individuals decide for themselves.
My school requires nearly all majors to have a laptop. We still have labs with desktops, but most of the students get by just fine with their laptops. As for expensive software, there are tons of student licensed apps that you get for free until you graduate or get to keep forever with a very small fee, etc. etc.
The one thing that forcing all the students to get laptops did was create the biggest filesharing server of all of Canada.
I enrolled in this brand new university, read first class. Everyone in the same year and program have the same laptops and software. Why can't we just site licence everything (or at least the cheap things) so most people have identical computers, I don't know.
This creates enormous problems everywhere. Logistics is a huge problem and they have only gotten worse over the three years we have operated. Just a huge mess and waste of resources.
I feel the costs are prohibitively high for repair and tech support. I believe that there should be only two kinds of failures fixed at IT, software and hardware. A software problem is automatically fixed with a re-imaging of the drive. Hardware failures are covered under warrenty so just give the student a new machine with a new hard-drive. Most of the tech people are tied up teaching fools how to run ad-aware because their computer "runs slow".
Some things that get me as a slashdot reader is that wireless software for linux is not supported and probably never will be. Firefox is not supported fully on our web-integrated side. Windows users have bug fixes and anti-virus updates pushed on them. Also, you can't change your workgroup as a windows user or you will not be able to sign back onto the school network.
I don't know if these problems are fixable. But if you want to hear all the great things about the system talk to my administration. UOIT is a small university just outside Canada's largest city.
When I went to college, the Chancelor's office was big on a the laptop requirement. At first the whole student body protested and won.
Then the Chancelor's office made the push again that same year, but this time they said people couldn't protest. There was a teacher from the computer science group who was in on it. He said that people were too late it had already been decided.
The ACM club still protested. Eventually, the liberal arts students were forced to buy laptops but the engineering students weren't.
That was good for me. The laptop requirement was stupid. I was broke. I had a crappy cheap computer running linux and at that time laptops were expensive.
These days, laptops are cheaper but it would still annoy me. It's like the whole school uniform thing. Next they're going to force you to run school approved software. Computer lab computers are disgusting, you shouldn't have to own one.
Wait till the apps and OS are old. There are times of the year when you need to upgrade things across the board. Use that to upgrade the hardware as well.
Case in point: Say all desktop machines are windows2000. Wait till its 2005 and both Windows and Office 2000 are about 5 years old and close to being not supported. Then get batches of new machines with WindowsXP and Office 2003. If you have CAL limits just auction the desktops around the same time. This is best at the beginning of the semester when students need to buy computers. This also allows you to just get machines with new OS and apps rather than worry about moving the OS and app licenses and selling the OS-less machines. PITA.
However if the whole campus is going towards a laptop model, just make hotspots everywhere and start out by letting the students use their laptops everywhere. Later you can mandate laptops for new students like some colleges. This will put all the desktops in disuse. Just sell em, no worries about CALS etc. You can swap the machines of the staff in the end, again by letting the OS and apps grow old enough not to be worth 'moving'.
Please dont forget to wipe drives before you auction them. Students can just use the stickers with serial keys when they reinstall the OS.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The only thing high-end about this whole thing is the president's nose. The advantage of faculty computer labs is that you can control the platform (assuming you pay your sysadmins what they deserve). Every PC can be locked down to the exact same hardware and software, everyone gets the same level of performance and reliability, plus you can probably get a nice deal from Dell/Apple for buying a truckload of desktops (and support contracts). Student PC's will be virus-ridden, unreliable, damaged from being hauled all over the place (and stepped/slept on after big unholy parties with unsafe sex and drugs and all that lovely jesus-raping stuff). Plus you'll get a handful of not-so-wealthy folks screaming at you for enforcing yet another unjust expense. I mean come on, education already costs an arm, leg and testicle for what effectively amounts to high-level pats on the back.
Keep your own PC's, and tell your prez to put the crack pipe down. He brings NOTHING to the table.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
It's hard enough getting students through the concepts in one program. Trying to simultaneously teach students how to do 3-D modeling or print illustration while each one is using a different program would be like trying to teach students who are each speaking only their native language how to, say, build a giant tower to usurp the heavenly power of the gods.
What school doesn't "force" you to do certain things on your property? At your school you can write your papers about whatever you want, in whatever format, language, font, and tone you'd like? Can you hand in a cocktail napkin with a drawing of your teacher as a nazi for your final project? Maybe at a few of the weirder art schools.
At any post-secondary school in a non-socialized country, you're paying them to teach you concepts. It's not high school, where the state is forcing your parents to pay it to babysit you and the law mandates your attendance. You're an an adult in a consensual situation and you've already placed an enormous amount of control in their hands by signing up. This is not an issue of freedom.
When I was at Waterloo it wasn't acceptable to simply choose to code an entire assignment in a different language in many of the lower-level courses. That definitely wasn't because Waterloo was a vocational college teaching us how to monkey with Java. Waterloo is about as abstract and conceptual as it gets, but they insisted on a certain language because spending the time to try to mark your assignment done in WeirdLanguage++ would take away resources from students who were willing to just do the damn thing, learn the concept, get the grade and then throw the source code in the trash, where most assignments end up.
Any assignment, any course, any major has requirements. If you don't like that schools require things of you, you learn in your basement. If you're getting bent out of shape over something as minor as whether you get to use open source, you need to grow up.
"Coke-only"? We've got Pepsi-only....
I haven't heard any complaints from my step-sister. She was required to get Adobe Creative Suite, Form Z, and some other software, but it was all under student pricing.
When I was an undergrad, DAAP students were the kids who you'd never see because they were constantly in studio and pulling all nighters. It seems things don't change much, as my stepsister is constantly working on stuff. Even during the holidays when the family was all home for break, she'd be using her laptop and working on projects.
My stepsister's figured out how to work the support issue - there's an Apple store in the local mall, so students tend to take their laptops in, and they all have Apple care plans. Admittedly, she's figured out how to work the store reps (usually through her feminine charms) so that she's on her third PowerBook, getting her first one replaced for some wireless and dead pixel issues, and I'm not sure how she talked them into replacting her TiBook for an AlBook . . .
Support is also addressed by the fact that every student has a laptop, so there's a lot of knowledge sharing in the studio and the dorms among students . . .
I'm a student myself.
...
First of all, if the computers will be owned/paid for by students
-Specify a minimum configuration (i.e. nothing slower than a P4) but do not require that they buy specific models or from specific manufacturers. Some people will likely want to use their own machines.
-Get special offers for a few laptop models from one or two manufacturers that have good quality and support (e.g. Lenovo) and can give your students a significant discount. Put your own software image on them and offer extended support for these models. That way those who are not too good with computers will likely buy these and it might be easier to support.
-don't think that you can have any kind of control over the machines. As soon as you try to lock them down, someone will see this as a challenge and try to hack it.
-This also means that your students will have to install most software themselves.
-Offer a good helpdesk and hotline.
-Software that's hard to install or expensive to license could run on a central server.
-Leave a PC lab or two there in case someone's laptop breaks.
-Offer storage on the network.
-Install a WLAN in the cafeteria and in spaces that students use to work.
-Maybe have a few laptops on hand that people can borrow if theirs break.
-If you want to force people to install virus protection, offer it for free.
-Take care that your network is secure. If you use WLAN, consider having users connect via VPN.
-Students will like you if you do _not_ restrict filesharing on the internal network. Handle this at the firewall.
where's all that Karma?
im not sure if it has been said before, but do NOT equip students with something as shitty as a dell laptop. thinkpad T series is the bare minimum you should consider, not only is lenovo's service GREAT, but they stop the HDD if they detect a fall and are encased in magnesium. a dell? well, have fun with the expense.
I am an Engineering Student at a Div One School. We also have a large art and architecture college and both require students to buy laptops. There are also labs full of duplicate systems with extensive software installations with a common disk image managed by norton ghost.
Most students get along by using licensed software on the lab computer and pirated software on their laptops and switching between the two when its convienent. All the art and architecture kids have powerbooks but they run a lot of autocad in virtualpc. (Im not to familiar with them, Art Kids never leave their building, neither do we really) All and all everyone gets their work done, however there are two problems:
Professors not capitalizing the fact that every student is supposed to have a laptop. I have never been asked to bring mine to class for notes distribution or in-class work.
The lab computers are prone to break as software gets more complicated and dependant on windows default root. AutoCAD and other big suites have a hard time working with roaming user profiles.
My advice to you is keep the labs functional make everyone buy a gig-sized usb key. Give the kids access to the printservers without dictating they need a specific username on their personal laptop, and don't expect many sales of dreamweaver or AutoCAD at the bookstore.
You are going from a managed network where you control patches and anti-virus to a network with student owned laptops that may or may not have the appropriate security.
'Same speed C but faster'
First of all, I think everyone overreacting on the issue of makeing students buying laptops. If you have even talked to anyone in college lately their already have to buy expensive textbooks and pay fees for computer usage. This might even save money in the long run and end up with something that is usefull when they're not in school. Not to mention software for educational use is usualy alot cheaper than for business or pro use.
I would make disk images to put on the laptops that only take up only a 5 or 10 GB partition for the required OS and Apps for the course and another partition for personal use. While in school or doing schoolwork the school partition will be used, while offcampus there personal one can be used. That way you can restrict admin privilages on the school partition while still letting the student have full control over their laptop. When they're at school they can log into a domain to run the required updates and turn in their work.
This solution I feel will benifit everyone because if the student messes up their school partition just backup their work to the school server and reinstall from the image this will keep the malware and other unwanted stuff from the school network and let the students have their stuff anywhere else.
Many commercial software products require use within a certain distance (not a joke) of the license server. Sometimes its the building, sometimes its 10 miles, who knows until you get the license going! Worse, you'll have to ensure that people can't get around it with VPN and the sort.
Check your licenses, be sure that you can provide this software to your end users for cheaper. We still run desktops because we can provide a unified, consistent environment (you can't do that with laptops users self-admin) and licensed software that is merely impossible to license to individual end users.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
You're missing the point. The school forcing you to write a program in Java is one thing, but that's not the same as forcing you to use IntelliJ on Windows to do it when you'd rather be using Eclipse on Linux or Xcode on Mac OS or Emacs on your toaster or something instead. That's all I'm complaining about: mandating for the sake of control, when there's really no good reason for it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Students have to buy their own books, transportation, pay for housing, etc etc etc, now laptops and thousand-dollar propietary software too?! Where the hell are the thousands of dollars in tuition going? For the price most students pay for tuition, the least you could do is put a desktop on the TOP of their DESK. Those wont get stolen, broken, filled with porn, spyware, etc. Especially if you put Linux on them and... god forbid.. TEACH THEM SOMETHING. Not to mention that youd be furthering education and a science, rather than padding the pockets of more corporations who are only undoubtedly going to charge even more to this enormous locked-in userbase the next year around.
Frankly, these contracts should be illegal for a public university.
In the matter of an obligatory durable goods purchase, such as a laptop, I am inclined to agree with you. However, for certain other things, such as the soft drink concession, I am going to side with the university as long as such monies would go towards lowering the student fees somewhat or supporting other university activities such as research, maintenance, department budgets or anything else that might otherwise result in more student fees. The inability to buy either Coke or Pepsi on campus is probably outweighed by paying somewhat less fees and from what I understand these beverage concessions can be worth quite a bit to the university. I guess it comes down to a simple choice, would you rather pay 10-20 more dollars per quarter/semester or be able to buy both Coke and Pepsi on campus? Most students would probably choose the former and not the later.
Because thieves'll clean out the place after the first 3 week.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Or Nix the printers.
Most schools with 'free' printing discover that it turns into a money hole.
This applies to regular computer labs, but may become even more of a problem when you arm everyone with a laptop, since they won't necessarily be in the same room as the printer. Out of site.. out of mind.
People will print anything and everything, they won't collect their documents, they'll print excessive amounts of stuff, you run out of paper... the list is endless.
One effective solution I've seen is a quota system, where everyone is given a certain quota of documents they can print every week/month/semester or however you want to break it down.
The other system I've seen is to have print requests go into a queue. If you want a document printed, you ask the lab attendant to pick it out of the queue and print it for you.
Both those techniques require some additional technology to implement, but the up front cost more than payed for itself in toner & paper savings. People will grumble about it for a while, but they'll adjust to the small nuisance and they'll also stop printing out 50 or 60 pages of crap at a time.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You've got a false concept going here. If the result is indistinguishable, they can't force you to do it. It's impossible, and you just ignore the rule. Nobody will notice.
If the result is not indistinguishable, any differences are your problem, not theirs. That's easy.
Most schools mandate so the students will have something to fall back on. If you want to spend extra effort doing something else, that's fine as long as it doesn't impinge on anybody. When students try it almost always does impinge on somebody, which is why administrators start to get pissed off.
My friend was in a class at a prestigious art school. They told her class "We're only teaching Macs in this class because we don't have time to go over the differences on each system and we need the colour matching. If you want to use a PC, taking care of the problems is your responsibility." 70% of the class just nodded because they had Macs. 20% nodded because they were willing to do the extra work to use PCs. 10% of the class spent the rest of the semester asking trivially stupid questions about key combinations and wasting everyone else's time.
So that's the upshot. You're pretending that you're all offended because it wouldn't make any difference, but if it wouldn't make any difference you could just keep your mouth shut and you'd be fine. The rules are there for the incompetent, right? But then you wouldn't get to make Charleton Heston style "from my cold dead hands" speeches. This isn't gays in the military. Don't ask, don't tell isn't a violation of human rights here.
There are *always* school rules that seem unreasonable. Look through any school handbook. Mine prohibits beverages on campus. These policies are unenforceable. Wise students don't make a fuss over it unless someone tries to enforce them. It isn't ok for the government to do this, but it is for a private institution.
Get good repair contracts because they are GOING to break and since the bought them from you, you have to support them. In fact, I would standardise. You pick....Mac OR Dell....NOT BOTH. Powerbooks can run just about everything and so can Dells. Find out the things you simply can't deal without and pick the platform that runs on. Convert everything else to the other. That makes for less laptops and part s you will need to have on hand. Other then that, but up a wifi network with a authentication box and let them have at it. Get site licenses for as much as you can.
Gorkman
"build a giant tower to usurp the heavenly power of the gods."
The guys at Ga Tech tried that! Well...sort of half baked, but they tried... You ever see the big pink tit there??
I am a student, and to be able to walk away from College with a degree and a laptop would be great. With tuition costs it seems like this kind of system should allready be in place in most universities especially since there is so much funding available from the government for anything technologically inclined.
As far as running the required programs off servers and liscencing are concerned, i'm sure that there would be some way to create accounts (mac or pc) where the students could only log-on to the school's network to use the necessary programs and have third party software on a separate account.
- If you immediately know the candlelight is fire, then the meal was cooked a long time ago.
the biggest problem ive seen within my college is that none of the teachers USE the laptops we all have them or for the most part because at my school its "recommended" but they dont utalize them at all
Now, the laptop thing... My school has only Apple and Dell, but I'd prefer an HP if they ever came out with a dual-core AMD _or_ Intel version of the dv8000z, with a discrete graphics card that is at least X700 level.
Oddly, for books & supplies scholarships you have to use them all at once, thus encouraging unnecessary spending; if I wanted to put that towards a laptop I'd be stuck with Apple or Dell.
Apple is good, but they don't have what I want yet, which would be a Core Duo 17" 1680x1050 with a frickin' TWO BUTTON TOUCHPAD, like that HP. Too bad Apple won't partner with other companies somehow to make it all magically work out.
Also, I hear good things about Apple, but having essentially zero personal experience, I don't have my own opinion. I need my tweakability such as that which registry tools (in Windows, my primary OS*) and YaST (I use SuSE 10.0), and what little I've seen makes me think many settings are hidden or nonexistant.
For Dell, I wouldn't be able to justify an Inspiron E1705 (for MCE), and I probably wouldn't be able to get a discount on one because it's not a recommended model and there is no midrange GPU option. Also, the white with silver is kinda ugly; the HP looks much more elegant.
* there are a few showstoppers that make me not switch to Linux full-time; extra mouse buttons not working right, extra keys not working at all; no shared file system that I can place my torrents on and still have them be readable to my friends' systems (one friend uses BSD, the other uses XP).
Aargh, this makes you use manual breaks br p!
I'm an assistant library tech guy at UWt and we're working on expanding our laptops, and let me tell you, it's a hell of a lot harder than PCs. The hardware configurations are all over the place, and unless you're planning to work with one laptop type for the entire expansion, it'll be troublesome.
The Club is worthless, and every time I see one on a car or in a store I laugh.
Sure, it is made out of steel and is probably fairly tough to cut through. But what is your steering wheel made out of? Plastic.
Cut the wheel. Two seconds.
If someone wants your car then a steering wheel lock is not going to stop them. It won't even slow them down.
In fact, the only thing it might do is say to a thief, "Have a look at this car, the owner seems to think it's worth steeling."
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
I've not been involved with a scheme like you are suggesting, but laptops are a nighmare to support. In my last job (in a school) we had about 50 teachers with laptops and there were about 25 shared laptops for students.
There were arounf 400 workstations, and I would say 80% of my time was taken up with "non working" laptops, from teachers installing dodgy programs to students breaking screens.
So, good luck and I hope you are adequetly resourced.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
I work with a laptop every day at the office and so I know from my experience that this is a bad decision.
The keyboard is too small, so I use an external keyboard.
The screen size is also too small, and I don't have an external monitor.
At the end of your day, health is important, and your eyesight will suffer from using a smaller screen over a prolonged period of time.
Also desktops are more powerful, faster and less frustrating to use.
If your campus allow wireless access, what's the difference between 1000 desktops and x laptops, and 1000 + x laptops?
I think weighing the facts to determine an answer depends on a key phrase in this post, which is that these laptops would be for "the graphic arts department" with the goal being to get rid of the computer labs. As a fellow graphic arts major myself, I can say that for me, one of the big draws to a college was being able to have the biggest and best hardware that money could buy. Being able to learn on state of the art hardware so that in 4 years after graduation I would be working on approximately equivelent. Or in some cases better 4 year old state of the art (ILM, Pixar, etc) Unless you are just taking notes and learning basic Photoshop, then you are going to want laptops in the $3,000 range. Print designs bigger than a 5x7" image/layout is going to need some heavy specs. Otherwise you'll hit walls waiting for filters, memory swapping, or wasted time playing with toolbar layouts on a small screen. And if we are talking multimedia instead of just print, then you have render farms, RAID storage, fast 3D hardware, and graphic tablets. And that doesn't even touch on software which is like painting with a single paint brush. Most high end studios use dozens of applications depending on which works faster for a particular effect. So I guess it depends on whether these graduates are making art with their hands or with their computers. And then the quality of degree you want to offer. Does this degree need to get them into ILM/Pixar type companies or just a local photography studio.
Someone mentioned about a tech support nightmare.
Limit hassles by limiting the laptops to an approved list of models.
This will cut down on having to troubleshoot every half-baked, bargain basement, which could be well speced but poorly implemented by some obscure brand with no support files or online documentation.
With say, three approved models (mid, high, specialized) it would be much easier for tech support crew to be on top of device drivers and parts.
Known issues as well as known working configurations would also be right at hand, perhaps even available as a resuce disc image.
You'll need a thoroughbred for Video Editing and CAD, but mostly you'll need a workhorse for everything else, and to maximise economies of scale, so maybe even two models will suffice.
I'm not associated with this institution other than linking to it cause it may be of some use to you.
Up here in Ontario, one of our newest universities started out with laptop infrastructure.
http://www.dc-uoit.ca/mobile/ University of Ontario Institute of Technology.
Mandatory for full-time, and opt-in for part-time.
Of course it helps that they actually supply course material through the use of their software, network and computers, otherwise it'd be a waste of money. Take a look at the way they implemented their laptop program.
Your spec will be outdated in 2 months when dell offer a new web special. JIT warehousing at all the major manufacturers means that even ordering the same model in 3 months means you'll get a different motherboard and a harddrive with 20G more space. (That means its time to develop a new image. yay.)
Yay me!
Another issue to consider is that working with a laptop as a primary computer is more likely to cause health problems. Or as Cornell University Ergonomics Website explains it:
"The reason is simple - with a fixed design, if the keyboard is in an optimal position for the user, the screen isn't and if the screen is optimal the keyboard isn't. Consequently, laptops are excluded from current ergonomic design requirements because none of the designs satisfy this basic need."
http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/culaptoptips.html
But of course that is an issue that should be handled by the college board and not the IT department.
> How did you handle software licensing, especially for high-priced apps? How do you do software installs/upgrades? What do you do for resource-hungry apps (e.g. CAD, 3D rendering)? What about traditional lab configuration issues like anti-malware software, classroom restrictions on IM/P2P/network gaming, standard configuration options, etc. that would seem impossible to do with computers you don't own?
:-)).
You are right: the main problem is to sort out the ownership of the laptops. How is responsible for it? If you expect 3000 students to be their own administrators, I can't imagine anything but chaos resulting from this (I guess even 3000 professional administrators would cause that
So either you break them down in groups and teach them how to administrate the laptop.
Or you take ownership of the laptop and have that done by professionals. This will only work if you also give the students some freedom, e.g. install new software. A dual boot setup (one official partition, and one private partition) might be helpful if you go down this road.
As for licensing, I think you have to buy either campus licenses or network licenses. Individual licenses are probably way to costly.
university of IT in oshawa, on, canada: http://www.uoit.ca/ "ontario's only laptop-based university"
they just opened in last couple of years. don't think it's been around enough to figure out if 'laptops for all' is the best idea. maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
of note: its an INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY university. does this mean they respect technology more ? everybody's a geek so support requirements are lower ? they get special financial support from the gov for 'driving innovation in education' so they can subsidize laptops ?
anyway, worth watching to see if they keep it up, or switch to desktops, expand to my neighborhood or shut down completely.
OpenOffice.org runs on legacy systems like MS Windows as well as most any other system. So, if you decide to move on, either for good or for just specific tasks or projects, you'll have the same program regardless of the platform.
The format, OpenDocument, also increases flexibility in that you can more easily exchange documents with users of other packages, or parse and make a searchable index of your work. If you later on decide to switch office software, you probably won't have to convert the files. Even MS is free to implement OpenDocument, though don't hold your breath -- the tricky bit there is if the new versions of MS Office really can handle arbitrary XML documents. If so then OpenDocument works. If not, then MS was just yanking your chain and you can add that feature to the long list of promised-but-not implemented features like WinFS.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is other hardware costs that a lot of people are likely to encounter.
I'll assume there will be wireless networked printers all over the place, so that most people won't have to buy a printer, but who knows? That may be an invalid assumption, too.
I work at a large company where a great percentage of the staff have a notebook computer rather than a desktop, including most people in IT/IS/development (which is most people; that's our business). Everyone with a notebook also has an external keyboard and mouse, and at least a 19" external LCD monitor. Using a notebook all day long is just too much of a pain (literally).
Apart from the cost of the notebooks themselves, a lot of students are going to be shelling out for external keyboard, mice, and monitors out of their own pockets, unless you make it a required purchase and they can financial aid for that, too. Either course will make you unpopular; if you don't require it, the people who want those things will be upset. If you do, the people who don't want them (which may be a minority, if my company is anything to go by) will be upset.
Oh, one other point: every Thinkpad I've ever used was better than every Dell notebook I've ever used; do the students a favor, and require (if you really must require certain vendors) Thinkpads rather than Dells, and let them run whatever OS they feel like on them (Thinkpads being rather Linux/BSD friendly, after all). I wouldn't require specific vendors, though; I'd outline some general specs, such as "You need a notebook computer with W GB of disk or greater, X MB of memory or greater, a DVD +/- RW burner or a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, and a display of at least Y by Z pixels" and let people buy what they want. For those who don't know enough to choose something on their own, you could have a list of select Thinkpad and Apple models (OK, and Dell too, if you really want them).
The major advantage of lab computers that I can see is what happens when one stops working.
Laptop stops working:
Student has to organise going to the support place, waiting for it to be fixed (possibly taking quite a while), possibly losing work! Student then has a legitimate excuse for failing to do work on time (leading to extra work for teachers/markers/etc.)
Lab Computer Stops working:
Student stands up, finds the closest free computer, and carrys on working. School organises backups, so no risk of losing work, support people can work on things in their own time.
As a student who owns a personal desktop, personal laptop, and regularly uses the lab computers. I think this has to be one of the stupidest ideas ever. It will be a nightmare, I suggest fighting the decision, or just getting out of there ASAP.
.sigs are for losers
"requiring (as in 'you can use financial aid to pay for it') each new student to buy a laptop that meets our specs (Apple or Dell, depending on major)."
I would be very annoyed if my school said "you must by a Dell" - hey it's a laptop peeps! Why can't I buy a Toshiba if I want to? If you're requiring them to spend 'their' money they should have the choice... I would prefer to be told what software you'll be using and you need a laptop that will run it - and for the non-techies offer some suggestions which include various manufacturers.
As we're on the subject of Software - how will this this funded? Will the school only be using OSS & free software? Imagine starting a new course and being told you need to go out and buy an Apple laptop and Photoshop, Maya etc - OUCH! There goes the money I was saving for the 6 pack of baked beans to last the year!
Also have you considered how the students are going to access their e-mail? I assume via a wireless network? How on earth are you going to keep that number of laptops secure to keep the network secure? A network is only as strong as it's weakest point, are you going to be servicing the students laptops to hopefully keep them secure? Surely that's a bigger task financially than having the labs??
Haydn.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
I go to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and we have a mandatory laptop program. They offer IBM thinkpads through the school, with software licenses that may or may not be needed. This can be good or bad depending on your major (I'm a management major, with access to SolidWorks and MatLab, which i don't need, but had to purchase other software that was required but not provided). Laptop theft is also a huge problem. If your school allows you to bring your own laptop with certain minimum requirements, i would go with that, since many school provided laptops are missing features to cut down on price.
Well, for starters, here's a list. I won't expound upon any of the ideas unless asked, as they're pretty self-explanatory, and I could go on all day about how much this kind of policy pisses me off.
- It creates a substantial greater financial cost for the student at little to no educational benefit (contrast a - say - $100 tech fee to a $400 tech fee per quarter - for a $1200 laptop! oh, and no you don't get a new laptop every 9 months...)
- for IT/CS majors, it is a bane due to the strict policy changes prohibiting personal laptops on the network at all
- Wireless is hell, whether it's simply getting the damn cards working, or getting them working in a building with several hundred other students all trying to use the same APs, crosstalk, etc. You simply can't get around this while still using Windows. Intels' chipsets are particularly bad.
- Your network will need to have damn good reliability, as if the students are required to have them, and are required to pay for them, they damn well better be getting the service.
- There will be huge issues with the policy put in place. "You mean to tell me I am personally responsible for this laptop, yet have no stake in its ownership? And I can't put any 3rd-party software on it, while you monitor all that I do on it?"
- You will probably drive off a large number technically adept students with such a policy. Tech schools need to not instigate this policy, as the only ones that will be attracted to it will be idiots that think making web pages means being an "IT professional"... Yes, in 2006.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Check this out!
http://www.ulapland.fi/?deptid=17355
Just like when another President decided to invade Iraq basically based on his "gut instinct".
You make small purchases based on "gut instinct". You do not dedicated large organization to an arduous task using "gut instinct".
Shooting from the hip is over-rated as the success stories are trumpeted. However, the you never here about the far more frequent colossal failures.
BTW, leadership is when you walk in a direction and people willingly follow you. When you have to drag everyone kicking and screaming at gunpoing, that's called a death march.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Laptops are pretty bad for artwork. My friends younger brother is going through art college now and he loves his laptop. It's runnin 3dsmax, photoshop and he does a lot of flash and web design work.
:)
Hes just learning 3d. From my point of view, his 17 inch laptop is no better than my 15 inch when it comes to performance.
First off. Laptops have very flakey video card driver support. Which usually means lack of opengl features, or buggy 3d acceleration.
In his case... 3dsmax performed like crap on it, and did some very odd things. On my laptop... Softimage XSI doesnt fit the wide screen resolution well and it underperforms and lacks some opengl extensions. XSI requires a 1600x1200 resolution to fit the ui. or atleast 1200 tall.
PLUS.. most laptops dont have serial ports.
Which means you better have a USB wacom... AND any dongles you might have for your applications... better be USB also. Or else they aint gunna worky
Laptops OVER HEAT. Especially when doing 3d. Often you can crash your laptop playing games or doing 3d work. And you can crash them very easily.
RAM. Filling up a laptop with a good deal of ram is expensive. Actually, buying a laptop that is anywhere near desktop performance is very expensive and costs more tha a comparitive desktop.
Laptop hard drives are SLOW.
For an artist this means... very poor at video editing and copying large files. Lets say you're copying a targa sequence from your laptop to a desktop. You could be sitting there for hours waiting.
lap tops are uncomfortable.
There's a reason why studios dont use laptops as their main workstations.
They're terrible for demanding work.
They're good on the move. They make great office word like computers. Email, web.... Even some photoshop and some 3d and games...
but overall they perform terribly and are quirky. They cost too much, have poor drivers and they break a hell of a lot easier.
You cant put 800 gigs in your laptop. Although you can have an external usb2 drive. Most laptops dont have firewire ports.... The better ones tend to though.
Laptops will never replace desktops in the art world. I'm not sure its a great idea to go with laptops but as you said... the choice has been made.
What you need to do is create bootable CD images (or USB if you're feeling frisky) for classrooms. These images would allow you to control licensing. You check out a CD and then check it back in after class is over... if you need it. Most students will get their own copies of stuff, but this allows everyone equal footing.
The other issue is malware. The bootable image should certainly contain some form of anti-virus/anti-malware that scans the user's HD while they work. Think Free, not Norton.
Other options include network booting of OS with applications.
I would *highly* recommend that you stick to one vendor/OS because when you have to deal with problems it will be much easier if you've specialized in the enviroment.
What you want is as much control over the students in class, while giving them as much freedom away from class as possible.
I see a lot of people here arguing the problems they saw with laptop use.
So far, I haven't seen anyone stop and ask - "What's the point?"
Do companies have people in meetings taking notes on computers? Nope. There are possibly a few isolated instances, but it's a lot easier and efficient to carry a pad of paper around.
Do you see people wandering around with laptops? Rarely.
The point of college is to either prepare yourself to enter the professional working world, or prepare yourself to stay in some form of education / research. In either case, walking around with a laptop helps neither. It is NOT a cost save over a traditional computer lab. Laptops, compared to desktops, are still overpriced and underpowered.
I've heard people say they can't take notes by hand quickly enough. Bullpuckey. Learn abbreviations and shorthand. Try typing a complicated mathematical formula out on a computer. No, it's not easy, or quick.
The question everyone should ask themselves is WHY this is a good idea? Answer - it's not. You'd be better off getting the kids PDA's so they remember when their classes are.
I've tried using laptops a few times. The keyboards are horrible, and the mice are worse. They're too expensive and too fragile. The chipsets change too fast to allow standardisation to reduce support problems. One bloke I knew had a laptop for 6 months, the battery failed, and he was unable to get a replacement battery. So now it's effectively a desktop PC.
I set one running a series, and 15 minutes later it had shut down because the hard drive got hot. Meanwhile, I'd been running the same series on a desktop continuously for more than a week.
Th best thing about a laptop is the distance you can fling them out of the window.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
I go to Winona State University which likes to throw around its claim of being one of the largest dual laptop colleges, 8000 students wandering around with laptops. Theft isnt really a huge issue. Personally i like the program, theres a 500$ tech fee which covers the laptop plus other things like printing, online storage etc. Have a choice of mac or pc, and you can switch between them for 50$. 500$ hurts, but since tuitions only 2k its not hard to get enough grants and scholarships to cover this. I recieved a nice tablet PC, now running osX86, ubuntu, and xp tablet edition beautifully. the wireless access is decent, only using LEAP but a lot of other universities just use open wireless. Main problem - school gets lax with tech support, with everyone using exact same hardware they just re-image computers when something wrong happens... very quick solution and they now hire basically music and business major type students for tech support. This just gets annoying.
I was going to ask a similar thing. In my country (the Netherlands) you cannot force a customer to buy a second product if he needs only the first. I doubt an Arts school would leave much room for students to choose what photo editing software to buy, for instance. I am sure students would go to the local competition watchdog over this.
I'd have to say the biggest complication I can see is just people like me (and likely the rest of /. as well) who would insist on having their own machine with their own configuration. I don't care how many guns they hold to my head, I am NOT giving up my Latitude CP with a fully-loaded Linux installation. Or my Micron TransPort XPE with OpenBSD. Never!
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
err can't you do samba shares for your friends to read off of? And I guess I mostly use my laptop with an external mouse, and also use a lil joystick in my keyboard rather than the touchpad most of the time, but I hardly think not having a second mouse button is a great reason not to choose a Mac (I started off using macs, though I do admit it's weird going back to only having one mouse button when I decide to play about with macs in stores now - anyway they had a new mouse out recently with 2 buttons didnt they? I actually started liking Apple less after they brought out the iPod, feel they have less geek/exclusivity factor or something, heeh).
As for the mouse buttons and keys in linux, I guess you need to go configure them up yourself, I dont know about the keyboard (you using one of those dumb ones with little 'email' and 'web browser' keys? o_0 ), but I remember reading online before about configuring up extra buttons - it maybe is even in xconf, tho that seems a little bit of a strange place to me. Someone here is going to know better.
which is totally what she said
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=computrac e
ya never heard of it before? really?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I go to a good school, lowest level cs course used to require MS Visual Studio (probably still does), provided for free of course. It is much simpler to have a single interface when teaching people things, and very little of the class was about how to use Visual Studio (imho it is intuitive enough to not need much teaching). They had libraries which worked for MS VS for example, and making them work with everything would be problematic I assume. Not to mention the pain the TAs would have in dealing with errors in a dozen different setups.
Intermediate CS class? Linux/unix; ssh for most things, remote desktop or go to the cluster for others.
Statistics courses? Usually whatever language the professor and TAs know, my school likes R (Minitab or SAS in some cases, the later more in the medical school). Engineering? Matlab usually. You get to pick the OS for these but the program is quite often set in stone.
This is a huge project, or atleast is going to become one very quickly.
.doc. Sure, there's Office for Mac, but I might get better results if I just burn the file to a CD and throw it into a woodchipper. - Enter my backups statement, again with the network shares - provide each student with a share on the network, inside his or her Windows 2003 Server profile (created when they logged into the terminal server), that is backed up regularly, AND is immediately accessable from their terminal login session.
First of all, the Remote Desktop idea was great, a quick and simple solution to that problem. The issue there is that it won't work. Any rendering using OpenGL or DirectX will not function across Remote Desktop. Period. There goes your Photoshop elements (believe-you-me, I was PISSED when I could see the photoshop canvas, but none of the toolboxes.), AutoCAD, AutoDesk, etc, etc, etc. You might want to look into NoMachine (or NX as some call it). I know it can handle some of the lower-level stuff, but nothing graphically intense.
Licensing? FlexLM is in a PAIN IN THE ASS. But it's great once you get it working. Of course, the app has to support FlexLM. I assume your university uses Active Directory, or Open Directory, or even an NT Domain system to manage the users / computers issues. If you were to, say, set up a series of read-only network shares where users - users in particular groups, CAD Students, for example - could map the drive and use AutoDesk, or even copy it locally if you feel like managing that. All you might need are a few Settings.reg files. Enter FlexLM, if you can get it working, and you might be golden.
DO NOT RELY ON STUDENTS TO DO THEIR OWN BACKUPS! I would reccomend setting up a terminal-server system, where everyone on campus has access to the same suite of applications (accessable over remote desktop, of course). Our company does this - we provide the professional set of Microsoft Office apps, our web portals, etc, etc. It's nice when I'm on my PowerBook and I need to write something or view something that's in a MS Word
Oh, and if you're going with Dell laptops, see if you can't put together a team of four or five IT or CS students to play tech support. Make sure you have a veritable shittonne of spare parts for whatever make/model of laptop your university will be providing for these students. Believe me, there's nothing like a panicked grad student, with a thesis tucked neatly inside a machine that won't boot. 'Course, that's only major in the long run, but you see my point. Short term: it creates campus jobs and keeps your people happy. Plus, no need to buy a larger wave of new Dells every eight months.
Lemme know if you have any questions.
Informatus Technologicus
My college is on the edge of doing the same thing. The biggest and most important thing to plan for is a complete remodeling of existing infrastructure. For example, since students are expected to the laptop all the time, remodeling of classrooms was required to add additional AC outlets so that students did not have to run a on battery during scheduled classes. Also, it was decided that a cat five plug in would be supplied for each 'workstation' and wifi as a supplement. This was done for security reasons because certain requirements (such as opening certain ports) was something that the IT department of campus wasn't willing to do on the wifi network, but tollerable for in class use.
.NET development and other software whose niche was based on the Windows platform.
One other thing that was considered for lowering the cost were custom built machines that were sold by the department at cost with Linux distros installed on them. The department also has some licences for VM Ware that were going to use so taht students could run XP Pro for
Bottom line...prepare to remodel your buildings--that part ain't going to come cheap. I think that if you're going to require students to have a laptop and use it, you better bite the bullet of providing some infrastructure that may not yet be in place.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Although I didn't go to Acadia many of my friends did during the first several years after they started the Acadia Advantage program (required laptops for all students). It was not a widely sucessful program at first like many of the press releases made it seem. There were the typical early adaptor pains like insufficiant web access, slow support, relaibilty, but then were others issues that would still be chanllenging anywhere. Professors at the university were days away from going on strike (in 2000 I think) over some of the adminissration's "Advantage" usage policies. Acadia thought that since they were requiring ALL students to get a laptop that ALL students better get use out of it. Professors were required to integrate the laptops into some part of their class. This was not much of an issue in programs like engineering, CS, physics, etc... but Drama? Fine Arts? yes possible, but not necessary. Academics don't exactly like being told how to instruct and what teaching aids to use. Most of the school benefits from the laptops but students in some programs end up with a $1000+ computer tax and I wonder if those programs enrollment suffers because of it? What kind of art programs are at the school?
My school did this, starting with freshmen the year after I started there. While I didn't have direct participation in the program I had friends who did, and working for the admissions office, explained the system to prospective students all of the time.
In short, it worked. The school is traditionally an engineering school, but all majors were required to own a laptop. The school had a deal with IBM to basically get the latest thinkpad at a great price (much better than the IBM employee price and much, much lower than anything comparable). The laptop came loaded with enough memory, hard drive space, a big, hi-res screen, etc., everything most people would want. But the big thing was, you weren't required to purchase a laptop through the school.
If you did purchase the thinkpad, there were benefits. The school had loaners should yours need repairing, the warranty repairs could be handled on-site, it was preloaded with all the software you needed (though you could buy the software fairly inexpensively at the campus computer store). But as long as you met the minimum specs (while minimums were specified, it was more of a soft limit, nobody checked, just make sure required software will run) you were fine.
The laptops were used in virtually every class, which was interesting. Overall, the students and faculty, while at first skeptical, really came to like it.
Yes, it's an additional cost, and college students aren't known for having excess money lying around, but an extra $1500 or so on top of your $120k+ tuition won't be noticed and if it improves learning, well, then it's a good idea.
The campus did keep computer labs though. All of the Sun, SGI and Mac labs remained, as well as most of the PC labs. This was not implemented as a way to replace the labs, more to augment them.
-dave
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
RSI and similar problems are widely believed to be much more likely to occur when working at a laptop for extended periods. In my opinion, any institution that is mandating the use of laptops, should be seriously considering what advice and facilities it is providing to its students. For more info see relevant advice to students at MIT and Is your laptop a pain in the neck?.
Well, you could stencil them instead.
Get 4" tall alphanumeric stencils, and using some really hard exterior paint, put everyone's initials onto the covers of the laptops. It's harder to remove than the serial number (except by painting over heavily), it makes your laptop easy to identify, and it creates a basically standardized, uniform appearance.
The latter may or may not be desirable depending on the institution -- I can see it probably being more popular at the USMA than at the New School in NYC...
My souce for the idea is that, a while ago, I took a course where we were required to purchase HP scientific calculators (actually at a fairly reduced price -- one of the reasons I took it) and they both engraved our names into the back of the units, but also stenciled our initials onto the front cover with a very heavy white paint. It's chipped off slowly since then, but I thought it was a great idea.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I attended Rose Hulman (www.rose-hulman.edu), and as incoming freshman, we were forced to buy a laptop with both network capability and a very specific software suite. It was much easier, of course, for them to select a software suite for an all engineering/science college, since our freshman classes were virtually identical.
Observations:
a) make sure it's a laptop that can handle being setup and tore down four-eight times a day. The crappy, crappy AMS Soundwaves we had (yay, 486 laptops, yay 1995) ended up with memory coming loose, broken wires to the screen and cracks in the cases. Two years later they switched to TI (eventually Acer) and the problems went away.
b) Make sure the whole faculty is ready to handle this transition. My freshman year, all the classes were ready, really, but the laptops were very much less integrated in subsequent years. I'm sure that's changed a lot by now, since I was in the class of 1999.
c) Make sure the network is ready for this. I'm not sure what percentage of these students wouldn't have brought a computer of their very own, but chances are that people that would have a desktop still have one with them, AND their laptop is on the net most of the time.
d) Professors should be ready for students to be distracted. They can now much more easily visit slashdot or Neopets or their email in the middle of the lecture.
I didn't go to RISD, but I was involved with many students at RISD.
They require all students to purchase the same computer. They had no choice. I didn't think this was a good idea because they couldn't get a better computer if they so wanted.
They handled software packages and upgrading by making all students submit their laptops for a period of time, and they wiped the HD and reimaged it with the upgraded software. Many students lost files this way, most likely through a loss of communication, or having the inability to backup such a large amount of data.
The school had to provide a team of people to service these laptops.
IMO, there has to be a better way. A way to allow students to spend their $2k on a computer they want, or $3k on a better one. I'd say remote desktop would be the best way to handle the software issue. You can upgrade as desired, on a whim, and not have to collect everyone's computers or risk data loss. That way, the computer is 100% theirs... and the school would have less responcibility to service the laptops.
The biggest issue you're going to have is that laptops are inherently unreliable. MAKE SURE that upper management realizes that you're going to need more people in the IT department if they want to do laptops.
Since the students have to pay for them, rather than the University covering the expense, you might want to push them toward specifying better-quality gear, like Thinkpads. This will raise the tuition somewhat for the students, but it'll decrease your load quite a bit. The students will undboutedly squawk about it, but good laptops won't break as much, and should last four years. Students won't know to be happy about this... all they'll do is complain about the cost. In my opinion, it's better to have them squawk once when school starts, instead of many times over their school career.
If management specifies lower build-quality stuff (Dells, for instance, are really not very good), then you will need even more help in IT, and you'll need to be prepared to deal with unhappy students. Lower-cost laptops are probably more expensive, over the long run.
If that happens, remember that the students don't know any better, they're getting screwed as much as you are... try to stress backups and the expectation of machine failure. If the students are taught to expect the laptop to break at any time, it will likely decrease your stress one heck of a lot.
If you have the infrastructure and space for it, take regular images of their systems.... that way, when systems fail, you can slap the last backup onto a loaner machine while you get them back up and running. If you use smaller drives (20 or 40 gigs), it'll be much less expensive to offer that service.
And give them a way to make images onto their home computers, whether or not you also offer net backups. Symantec's Ghost, for instance, has changed from a system-image tool to a system-backup tool. The new version sucks as a system imager, but it's a good backup utility.
Again, this needs to be a whole mindset change. It's more of a big deal than you may realize. With desktops and servers, the expectation is that things will work almost all the time, and failures are treated as unusual exceptions. You take backups, but you don't have to rebuild systems too often.
With laptops, especially cheap ones, the whole organization has to switch to failure-expected mode. You're not just in backups-as-insurance mode anymore... it's more backups-as-daily-necessity. And you will need to become very efficient at repair... you're going to be doing a lot of it.
All I can say is you will need to be well reasourced if this project is going to be successfull.
-If you are going to support notebooks make sure they are of same vendor/model. It will make it much easier than having to learn the quirks of a dozen products. You should be able to get significant discounts if ordering units in bulk.
-Build a SOE, it will again be million times easier to support if you have a standard/identical software installations.
-Running all desktop apps on a terminal server migh make software maintenance/support/patching easier.
-Lock down the notebooks. If you are going to have to support the software you need to make sure students cant mess with settings. If they are going to connect to YOUR network make sure that they will need software updates/security settings/policys.
-Lock down the network. If students have the abilities to install/run their own installed software it will also increases the possiblity of nasty cracking tools to be used. Things like locking down the network (things like stopping the notebooks from chatting to each other), firewalling and securing servers etc.
Biggest thing in my school's setup is the repair program in place. Laptops break. Its a fact of life, and doubly so in college. A student may or may not take the best care of it possible, and they may just break in spite of the loving care and attention they get. If they have to go to the manufacturer to get repairs, they're pretty much screwed for 3 or 4 weeks. If you have repair programs on or near campus, they're out of a machine for a week or so, and at that point, they could use a lab (we still have a few labs set up).
izm
By the way, if you go the laptop route, I'm going to humbly make a few suggestions:
Insist all the student buy accidental damage coverage and theft insurance.
If it's in your budget, provide a server for the students to back up their important work on -- it could also make for a good (read as "secure") \share location .
1. We kept our traditional lab and use it for the first two years, then require laptops for students entering their junior year. This allows us (and the students) to focus on the concepts at the beginning, then the various technological issues once they're more ready for them.
2. Although I expected it, we saw very little reluctance to the laptop requirement. On the contrary, students seem to really like it, and it's been something of a selling point for our program.
3. While we're Mac-based, we allow students to purchase Windows laptops provided they accept all responsibility for configuration issues. So far, we've only had a couple students go the Windows route, and it seems to have worked out OK.
4. Good handouts are essential, unless you want to spend all your time answering the same questions over and over and over. (How do I connect my laptop to the printer? How do I make a backup? Etc.)
5. The biggest problem has been damaged laptops, where students have to send them in for repair. (ie. spilling beer on the keyboard) How do students complete their coursework while they wait? It's tempting to simply call it their problem, but practically, this doesn't really work. Whenever possible, we try to maintain at least one lab machine with all the equivalent software they can use in an emergency.
6. Software updates can be a problem, too. Often, a company (Macromedia does this a lot) will update their software mid-year, and some students will rush out to purchase it. This can get the class out of sync. Our policy is to pick a version we will teach for the year and stick to it.
7. Fostering a sense of community has been difficult. Students tend to finish class, pack up their laptops, and head out the door. Right now we're in the process of re-designing a number of our work spaces to make them more laptop-friendly, in the hopes of encouraging more collaborative work.
So, overall it's been a good thing. But we're still in transition.
Heh, the "Hot Pink" of computers?
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Seton Hall University has been doing a "mobile computing" program for about 5 or 6 years. Works excellent.... but the ranking systems which rate universities STILL weight the ratio of desktop computers - to - students.... which makes our IT ranking not as great as a university with no laptop program and a bunch of labs all over the place.
On a different note,
Having done security for post secondary institions, and presently head of security for a college of art and design, be prepared for a sudden surge in, and a lot of grief dealing with sharply rising theft rates with all the laptops. Laptops are gold for theives, small, easily hidden, and easily sold for decent money.
You should think about the things that you can do to help the students/users secure their laptops while they have them out and in use, such as issuing security cables with the laptops, and places to lock them up to. Relatively small things such as that can make a big difference.
I used to work at university with a similar laptop initiative. The comments above are accurate, you will have problems, it won't work well at the beginning. It seems as though your university is barrelling ahead without realizing what they're getting into. Rather than jumping from a computer lab model to a laptop model in one year, I would suggest phasing it in more slowly. Set up a laptop support program for users who already have laptops. Then start offering a standardized laptop that students can purchase at a discounted price and receive support for. Then implement your mandatory laptop program (preferably with a standardized laptop provided by the college). At each stage re-evaluate your approach and fine tune your support program as this will be the main issue. It will go much more smoothly if you give yourself enough time to work out the problems.
I'm not dead yet!
A laptop program is not always a bad thing. At the college I work for, we have a 3 year lease on Gateway laptops through US Bank. The college builds in the cost of the laptop into the Tuition of the students. Since it is a 6 year program, the 3 year lease is ideal so the students have updated hardware midway through. All the laptops have 3 year warranties and are covered in case of theft or accidental damage. Also the lease for the second half of students, the ones who will graduate, is a lease to own deal where the students may buy the laptop out at the end of the lease to take with them.
The biggest trouble you will find is that students break them almost constantly. Because of this our school has worked out a deal with Gateway where we are what is considered a "Gateway self supporter". Each helpdesk technition becomes Gateway certified and we are able to repair the laptops in-house. We also recieve monetary compensation for doing so (i.e. $X.00 for every motherboard swap and $Y.00 for every screen ect) We order our own parts and repair our own machines. We also have about 10 - 20 extra laptops of each type for swapping out the ones that have issues. Because of this our general turn around time is a couple hours but 99% of the time its within 24 hours.
The downside to having students use thier own machines is that when they break they could be without the machine for a couple weeks and in most cases will not be able to do the assigned work or participate in class.
The downside to the way we do things is that it is an inventory nightmare. With the almost constant swapping of laptops it gets hard to keep track of who has what. I think laptops are very doable if the college is the one providing them, but having students bring in thier own could be a nightmare.
Be wary of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
I work for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where we started up a laptop initiative two years ago. Freshmen who enter in the Fall are required to purchase an Apple laptop that they will use throughout their stay at the school. When setting this up we had several concerns that we addressed before we launched and some that came up after things got rolling. Due to the complexity of the project, I'm only going to cover some of the main points, and not in detail.
Licensing - We decided to provide a full suite of applications, with licenses served using Sassafras KeyServer. This allows the school to own and maintain a smaller pool of licenses that are used by the community as a shared resource. A small technology fee is applied each semester towards software and infrastructure needs. Students have access to software as long as they are enrolled at the school. We use LDAP authentication to control access to the keyserver. Pro Apps (Final Cut, Maya, etc.) are made available by request. Certain apps, such as Maya, are only available on campus to keep costs down.
Distribution & Updates - We decided to use a split partition scheme on the hard drives with the Users folder mounted on a separate partition from the rest of the system. Each Fall we image new laptops using Bombich's NetRestore. Returning laptops are also re-imaged, using different post-restore actions to place the latest versions of the system and applications while leaving the user data intact. Only their local NetInfo entry needs to be rebuilt. Since the majority of studnets only have one account, Setup assistant takes care of this so long as the user enters their old login name exactly as it was before. Users are required to back up their own data before restore, but the backups are rarely needed.
Workflow - Using a laptop on campus to scan, print, surf the web, etc. is quite different from using a Desktop. We have a fairly secure wireless network that uses WPA enterprise & 802.11x. Due to bandwidth limitations, we discourage large file sharing and printing over wireless and provide peripherals areas that have stations where students can connect via ethernet while they scan, print and file share. Wireless is used for "lifestye" behaviors like web browsing, email and chat. While some of our "fixed fleet" is being decommissioned, a fair percentage of Desktop labs will remain and continue to be used for high end peripherals, video and 3D work. Students can perform the bulk of their digital coursework on their laptops.
Staffing - we have several staff dedicated to laptops and have experienced a fair amount of hidden labor costs. Many of us have put in extra hours to make this thing fly. Mileage may vary depending on the platform you choose and existing infrastructure.
Documentation - We have created a series of PDFs that describe in detail the systems and peripherals students will encounter during workflow. These are included with their software and also available via the intranet. Documentation is updated as needed.
We're currently up to approximately 1200 laptops or the halfway point in delpoyment of this program. So far, feedback, for the most part, from users is positive. Most entering students are very excited to be getting a new laptop and returning students are happy to get the latest applications and OS. Students have been pretty understanding about having to re-install their "custom" applications. Frankly, they're happiest to see their old desktop pattern and documents after restore. Since we test the template thoroughly, most of the problems we encounter with students involve some sort of hardware problem -- spills, dead hard drives, dents, dead batteries.
One of my friends went to school for animation and had a related experience. He had to buy an IBM Thinkpad for the course. We looked at his options, and were disapointed. For an animation program, the video card nor the RAM were near sufficient. We contacted the school and begged them to let him buy a dell we were looking at that was not only cheaper, it was superior in every respect. They refused, claiming that the schools support staff was only familiar with the IBM thinkpads. We gave up, he bought the thinkpad. Near the end of the first year of school, he did actually run across an issue with his machine. He did was he was supposed to, and brought the machine into the schools computer store for 'repairs'. Their solution, format the machine and give it back to him. Halfway through the second year, as many other students were having problems with his machine, the school admitted its mistake and offered to buy back the laptops from anyone who wanted so they could get the laptop they would prefer. He ended up spending a little extra cash and got a nice alienware. I think its a great idea to have students have laptops, but it would be nice to offer some insightful guidance as to which machine they should purchase, and not limit their options too much.
Why not use the thumb sensors they have on many modern laptops today? Then, if someone steals it, they can't use it. Needless to say though, they would surely find a way to hack that... It could also send a satellite tracing sensor if someone unsuccessfully tried to thumb-in, but of course, this too could probably be hacked...
WikiCreole - a common wiki markup language
While the idea of all students on campus posessing laptops is a good general concept....replacing computer labs with a mandated purchase program is just insane. To keep down tech support costs, the univ. will have to support a VERY limited selection of laptop models and OSes. Laptops will have to be heavy desktop-replacement types to ensure enough power ("student grade" laptops just won't cut it) which will force each student to lug around a 10 lb brick in addition to books. Trust me, 10 lbs is a lot of additional weight. As far as OSes go... mandating M$ or OSX will be the default...compsci majors and other geeks who want to learn/run/experiment with linux, UNIX, OS2, BSD, or any other "alternative" system will be on their own. While they may have the skill to operate without tech support, a mandatory OS will relate directly to mandatory file formats and third party software. Hard to run Linux when you are forced to view .wmp vids for your classes - not to mention all the hardware compatibility issues, WPA problems,etc if students are limited to a particular model. Finally, the average life of a laptop (in "responsible or "not student" hands) is about 4 years. This means you'll have older laptops working with the latest models. Think Win98 running alongside 2000 or even (ugh) ME. More up to date... XP laptops for some VISTA for others. So what office format do you use? XP's .doc, or VISTA's fancy new pseudo-open thingy? Upgrade everyone? What about graduate students who's systems are >4yrs old? Make them buy a 2nd laptop? Lots of issues to be sorted out here. I guess my point is that while mandated proprietary-configuration laptops may look like a simple solution, it probably isn't a good thing in the long term. Okay, now that I've mentioned a few problems...how about some solutions?
First, if you want to mandate laptops, that's fine. It's even okay to "officially" (read: for the masses) support a single model/manufacturer. But alternative systems should be, if not supported, then not penalized. This means that file formats used throughout the university must be portable across most M$, MAC, and POSIX systems at a minimum. Some distro-generic UNIX/Linux/BSD support would be a good thing as well. If the school doesn't want to go open-source, they should at least go open-format.
Second, keep the computer labs available - especially those that are associated with engineering, graphic design, video production, compsci,and the like. Having a handful scattered around the campus for the 20% of generic students who's laptops are in the shop having the latest malware/spyware removed is another necessity.
Third, use MAC address authentication rather than WPA on the network if your univ is not forward leaning enough to provide free wifi to the surrounding community (hey, I can dream). WPA just isn't supported widely enough yet....perhaps in a couple years....
From my experience as a tech....this whole idea is one big Cluster*. I'd still like to see a little more emphasis on getting students to learn some basic computer use, however, so I suppose I must lend grudging support to this idea. Idealistically, I'd love to see laptops included with tuition, running Linux/BSD, with an open-to-the-public wifi link, but that's little more than a fantasy......
He who would be a man, must be a nonconformist. -- Emerson
2) 24-hour computer labs with free printing. End the tyranny of labs that close at 10pm and/or charge for printing!
Eh... I worked in a lab with free printing for my freshman and sophomore years. Do you know how many people we had who came in and tried to print 40-page papers, and print 20 copies of them so that they could avoid photocopying costs? Add a small cost, maybe a 100-page printing allowance with 10 cents for each additional page, and people will act a little more sensibly.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I worked at tech support for a school, and I can tell you right off the bat you're going to spend more time and money if you go the route of doing 1 notebook per student.
a personal workstation means a greater number of hardware and software compatability issues, problems they'll bring to you for help.
Secondly notebooks are NOT good workstations for graphic majors. LCD screens can be tricky when dealing with color value and contrast. (look at a grey scale chart and tilt the screen very slowly)
If you're going to be working with print quality work a notebook is the last place you want to be working on, if you plan on doing anything beyond 8x11 you're going to need a beefy system. Atleast a laptop with a good GPU and a gig of ram.
I advise you to have staff do a test run. Have them buy a laptop, and use it as their main graphics workstation. and I dont mean give every paper pusher a laptop I mean your Designer/Artist teachers; and force them to work exclusivly on it. I'd bet they'll complain about slowness, screen brighness/contrast and physical system weight.
And just incase, when a hardware vendor asures you that the specs they're giving you will run the software just fine.. they're telling you the software loads and executes.
For minor edits and presentations notebooks work great, but theres a reason they're not called Portable WorkStations
I know that this is the trend in my state's public universities.
4 -04.html
Here at FSU, I think the enforced policy goes into effect this fall, and I think something similar is happening at UF.
http://www.fsu.edu/~trustees/meeting/minutes/09-2
http://www.circa.ufl.edu/computers/
At least UF makes some mention of consideration for this in financial aid.
I suspect the schools think they can save money buy not having to create/maintain the labs, even if more financial aid has to go out. And I'm sure they'll get some nice kickbacks for pushing something like Dell on the students.
I like bread.
Aside from the initial added cost of the laptop over the desktop, the additional maintenence (1.5 manhours to support a laptop -v- ~.9 manhours for a desktop), the lost time for warranty repairs (cracked screens, lost/defective wireless cards, coffee spilled on keyboards being the biggest ones) and the increased theft/loss of systems with business data on them, "" our transition went very smoothly ""
What a load of shit. This is just a way to force students who aren't qualified for financial aid, or for low amounts of financial aid, to pay for their own computers, rather than the lab approach where the school buys them for everybody. It's a nice headline I'm sure, but it's just an prettied up way to save the school money, even though it will make the school more expensive (for, say, a $1600 laptop and a 4-year degree, that's $200/semester), but it won't have any appreciable effect, if any at all, on the rules for student financial aid. There are very large numbers of students who don't qualify for much in the way of financial aid beyond the basic federal loans, but still can barely afford to go to even a cheap local college. This program will just make it harder for those people.
Unpleasantries.
"...my intuition says that 1000 unsecured laptops will take more work to support than 300 locked-down desktops..."
... ...hee hee... ...hah...
um... heh... heheh...
BWAAAAAA-HA-HA-HAHAHAAAAAAA!
*sigh*
sorry.
My school here in Bozeman Montana is actually planning on doing something somewhat similar to yours. As we can already use our Financial Aid for computers, the labs are going to move some of their desktops somewhere else and allow students to use their laptops in lab rather then the provided desktops. As for licensing, I am not sure about all departments, but the Electrical Engineering department provides each appropriate student with an account on some website which will sell applications for next to nothing. 15 dollars for Windows XP anyone? Not bad but why not get yourself a copy of Gentoo and buy some beer with the money you saved?
The University of Idaho has spent a large amount of resources developing two similar programs that lease laptops to students. The first is a mandatory program through the College of Business and is called IXL (http://www.ixl.uidaho.edu/). All students entering their Junior year of study are required to lease a laptop from the college. The lease term is four semesters and the students have the option to buy the laptop at the end of the term for $1.
The second program is an extension of the IXL program. There was a demand to offer this program and other products to the general campus. V.Mobile (http://www.vmobile.uidaho.edu/ offers a very similar program to IXL, but is optional to the entire campus.
Our program is modeled after several other institutions across the country (Babson College and University of North Carolina). I would strongly suggest that you visit Babson or UNC and check out their program.
or you could just wait till the $100 laptop starts to retail for like $200+ or whatever they quoted a few months ago.. other than that, its a huge waste.. more trouble than you're bargaining for..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
I think this is a great idea for a wide variety of reasons (which I won't get into now because the poster indicates the decision to do this has already been made, now they have to figure out how to do it best). I recommend looking at the top 20 MBA programs for guidance. Most of them have mandatory laptop requirements with high priced software (for finance etc) provided to each student during the duration of their stay at the University. They have figured out how to get the machines into student hands quickly, how to service the problems, and how to manage software.
I can't say that I really care for standardizing/requiring the purchasing of a laptop. I'm sure there are plenty of students that don't want the additional charge(s) for $1,000+ on their student loans. Don't get me wrong, I love a new laptop the same as the next guy but I tend to value freedom of choice a little more.
I am currently a student at the University of Wisconsin Stout. The university is 4 years into its laptop program, and believe it or not it is not that bad. Since my freshman year I have worked for the Telecommunications and networking department of UW-Stout at their computer helpdesk, and i've seen both the goods and bads of a campus-wide laptop program. The laptops are not actually owened by the students, and are instead leased to them. Every two years students go through a "refresh" program, where they return their old laptop, and are given a newer, more powerful laptop to use through their next two years of school. For software, the campus purchases a number of lisences for most of the expensive software, and uses a keyserver program to regulate their use. We have had some difficulties with this however, because off-campus ISPs will often block the ports which keyserver uses for one reason or another. I know many people who have had to spend hours on the phone with their ISP trying to convince them to un-block ports. This can be hell for users who are not very computer literate. As far as technical support goes, the university has two computer helpdesks on campus, and students can call or bring in their computers when they have a problem. When students have major hardware problems that take a long time to repair, they are able to check out a loaner laptop so that they can still do whatever work they need to while the laptop is being repaired. If the damage is caused by the student (because it was dropped, spilled on, ect), the student is charged a small fine to cover some of the repair costs. It starts at 50 dollars, and increases by 50 dollars with every subsequent incedent of student-caused damage. Software troubleshooting, and Re-Imaging of laptops are done at no charge to the student, as are hardware repairs which are not student-caused. Believe it or not, thefts of laptops are fairly uncommon, though they do happen. If laptops are stolen, the student is charged a 400 dollar replacement fee, and they recieve a different computer. The campus does have a wireless network which is available everywhere except inside the residence halls (there are ethernet ports in each dorm room, making wireless unnecesarry). The school regulates network usage using a Network-Registration system, which requires users to register the mac adress of every device they connect to the network, and students are held responsible for devices which are registered under their name. Ocassionally, the university will recieve complaints from groups like the RIAA ect. because of students illegally downloading material. In this case, the school uses the Net-Reg system to block network access to all of the devices that are registered to the "offender", untill they are able to take appropriate punitive action. I hope you find this information helpful, if you have any more questions about how the laptop program works, I'd suggest looking through the university's website. (www.uwstout.edu)
We had mac labs and dell labs. There was never a time in any lab that i went in, ever, that 100% of the computers were 100% working. The digital art classes i took all had the student do work on their own time because the one art computer classroom was used by another class at the time ours was held. This allowed the student to use whatever program and hardware they wanted to finish the work, even though Adobe products were encouraged, since the teacher knew those programs better, so he/she could offer help to the student. There were a few classes that were specific to a program, but they were introductory classes aimed at people who had never used a computer before or had never used a computer for anything more than IM and Word, which is the majority of artists in college. With student's that fall into that category, they are going to use whatever tool you teach them to use, and most likely they will never search to use another tool until a job tells them they need to. I'm sure there are several philosophical and sociological studies out there which explain this. Even Newton's first law of physics can be used to illustrate this phenomena.
Now, this example will not be 100% the case with an art school but it is very similar. My girlfriend is in med school and they were "forced" to buy a laptop that the school picked out for them. The reason they could not choose a model is probably to ease the load on the tech support. If every student has the exact same laptop with the exact same base programs, then you are basically just dealing with a computer lab. When you start letting people pick which computer they want and the base software they want, you throw more variables in to the equation, which makes it harder to diagnose problems. When my girlfriend saw that she HAD to buy a laptop and it HAD to be the one they gave her, she complained about it every day until she actually recieved it. She complained about it being so expensive and how she thought the quality wouldn't justify the price. Part of the expense is the insurance on it and the service cost. If her laptop is stolen, she gets a replacement free of charge. If it breaks, she takes it in to the tech guys and has it fixed relatively fast, usually in a few hours, for free. Personally, i think this is a great idea, because she can take her lap top with her anywhere she wants to study. So, she can study in the library, on the couch, at a friend's house, in the "pods" (a group study area at her school), and so on. I also think this is a great idea, because it gives every student the exact same tools to learn with and use.
my girlfriend also complained that she already had a desktop computer and had no need for a laptop. The fact is, once she got her laptop, she never used her desktop, even though her desktop has everything she needs and it was still set up in her room. She takes her laptop to lecture every day and uses it to watch videos of the lecture and review the powerpoints every night. She uses the laptop to take all of her exams. Basically, her life revolves around that laptop. The school tells the students to not install any software updates until the school tests and distributes them. This is to prevent updates from breaking software and then having a huge flux of students coming in at once for tech support.
i hope that made some sense and wasn't too much of a incoherent ramble of thoughts.
The hard drive is currently NTFS in a USB 2.0 enclosure, so I can just bring the drive and connect it easily. I want to be able to write to the drive from both Windows and Linux. Also, since they are living in the dorms, the firewall blocks many things such as Samba.
2 681n _dv8000z_is_big_heavy_and_full_of_features/. asp
I have the MX700 mouse, with 2 thumb buttons and the scroll buttons above and below the scroll wheel. I believe I can use imwheel to capture the thumb button events (8 and 9). xmodmap only works on the corepointer, which I have the touchpad set as. I do like the scroll buttons working as default, though.
My keyboard is the Logitech keyboard that came with the mouse (MX Duo). The buttons I am referring to are the volume wheel and the buttons such as Media, media control (Play, Stop, Forward, Back), Web.
These buttons used to work perfectly using lineakd, but some update broke them so they no longer generate events in xev, despite having set the keyboard to the appropriate model, "logiinkse", in xorg.conf. Also, lineakd now just gives me a string of xkbsetmap errors when I start it.
As for Apple, if they come out with a 17" core duo with a keyboard that fits me (like the HP) and an exterior with the right connectors (not that I'd use them all), then I'd love to get one; however, I'd still need to run Windows for games -- and that would have to be Vista.
Vista so far has incomplete drivers (current ATI vista drivers have some functions like tv-out disabled). Vista 5270 has moved many options around just for the hell of it -- display control panel tabs are separated into different places, for example.
The HP:
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=
http://www.mobilityguru.com/2006/01/11/hp_pavilio
Vista current build screenshots:
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_5270
2 things I hate:
IGPs (even if ATI or NVIDIA, I still want more power -- I want HL2 at 1680x1050 if at all possible)
Companies moving things around just for the hell of it so you can't find anything
At my previous employer (a "large technical college" system whose ads appear on late night tv) I worked on a project to address some of these questions in a laptop iniative. There's no magic answer to the software licensing question, and it can a major challenge to deal with the big expensive apps (3dstudio, maya, adobe stuff, autodesk). Most of the software vendors still aren't friendly to the laptop model. You either need to: a. Negotiate student use as part of your licensing deal (good luck) b. Have students buy the software (very expensive, a waste when they change programs, upgrades?) c. Open-source alternatives (Pov-ray, qcad, gimp) d. Look into network licensing programs like FlexLM. The major downside of open source is that if you want to get a job, people will expect you know the commercial tools. Many of the key commercial apps support FlexLM, which allows software to be installed on more machines than the institution has licensing. When the software is launched, there is a licensing check over the local network to ensure that concurrent use is at or under the license count. The major downside of this approach is that you have to be on the LAN to Terminal approaches (citrix, term serv, etc) probably aren't going to work well with the fat hog applications you are talking about here. Best of luck!
My college (where I am also on the IT staff) has a hybrid approach - workstations for power hungry software laptops can't easily handle but everyone still needs a laptop - and the only big hurdle for us seems to be liability issues. Because we don't want to get sued by someone who believes that we broke his laptop, the IT staff cannot offer any support beyond basic support for connecting to the networks, printers, and fileservers. It's actually a pretty good policy, tho, because it has forced a lot of students to actually learn how to install/remove software, how to maintain their computers, and how to go get help from a professional when things break, which is a damned important concept in the design world, since most design firms don't have on-site tech support.
I've sat on a committee that's implementing this same sort of initiative at a major university, and the consensus from all factions was that there's still a need (though substantially reduced) for labs. There are many reasons for this:
1) Maintenance: Users suck at keeping their systems in good working order. I personally got my start in IT at the suggestion of a fellow student who said "you should work at the helpdesk" when I got a virus off her computer after she came into the lab at 3 a.m. the night before a major assignment was due, since she couldn't complete it on her system.
2) Reference systems: Grading any kind of programming assignment is an absolute nightmare if you don't know what libraries someone installed to get something working. This isn't really a problem with low-level "hello world" stuff, but when you get into higher-level stuff (particularly graphics) it becomes a big deal. If a TA can say "I will be grading on a lab machine." and all the lab machines have a standard build, everyone wins.
3) High-end workstations: No laptop in the world will hold a candle to that dual G5 in the media lab for video editing, or to the 2 GB RAM, Quadro FX-endowed CAD workstation in the engineering lab. Students really will need these things.
4) Productivity: Why do groups of computer science majors, who each own a desktop, a server, and a laptop, go to the lab? TO GET WORK DONE.
Depending on how well wired your campus is, you can probably lose 3/4 of your labs, but you still need some.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
I will stop taking my child's deduction at age 16. she will have to start putting in her own tax forms every year and when she hit's 18 she will qualify for every financial aid benefit as she will look extremely poor.
You can choose not to take the deduction yourself but that doesn't automatically entitle her to do so. Your child is still legally required to file on her forms that someone else can (as in "is allowed to", whether anyone actually does or not) claim her as a dependent. So her tax forms are going to reflect her actual dependent status. She might get away with self-deducting as long as you don't, but a minor claiming herself with a pittance (if any) income and listing your address on the return is quite likely to be a red flag for an audit.
What you could conceivably do is charge her a token "rent" with board included. Make sure she keeps receipts, they will be questioned and she probably will have to endure at least one audit. And the IRS will probably rule that it's an abusive tax dodge (because you're still effectively paying her way by implicitly subsidizing her living expenses whether or not you actually put money in her hands) and disallow her claiming herself, and you're back to square one.
When I was trying to get recognized as an independent adult back in 1994, the school financial aid officer started by asking for proof that I had actually paid the majority of my own living expenses for the previous year. (I eventually got recognized on other grounds.)
You mean well, but risking jail time for your daughter and yourself on charges of conspiracy to commit tax evasion is probably not a good way to start her off in life.
-- Old Man Kensey
In 1986 I joined the first class at the U.S. Air Force Academy to be issued computers (Zenith Z-248 80286 desktops, to be exact). The current classes get Dell laptops, but the computer labs still have computers. A bigger issue is the fact that cadets have to own their computers and they have to connect to a goverment network to use it. All their internet access goes through the USAFA firewall, so no porn, no IM, etc.
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
I dont see why it would have to be Vista - I was running games perfectly fine on 98 'til last year, when I started full time work and decided I may as well get XP (seeing as I am using XP/2000 all the time at work, and as IT Admin I may as well update my own machine to the same as the work ones..). Then I got completely fed up of XP sometimes literally taking 10 minutes (Athlon64 3000+ with a gig of RAM just in case you're wondering) to get from the login screen to the desktop and am currently using Ubuntu pretty much exclusively. Funny how I have always been a gamer, and was interested in becoming a games programmer for most of my life, but now that I've started work full time I hardly ever play games, apart from when I go home I may mess about on the PS2.. anyway unless you want to play Halo 3, and I dont see why anyone would rather do that than play any other FPS (the single player is crap, and the multiplayer didnt seem that special, tho admittedly I was only playing 1 on 1 on an XBox, with a durn controller and not a mouse :( ).
;) kidding.. though it's what I use.. I'd much prefer screenrate to resolution - ever try quake 1 at 320x200 and see it fly along? I thought it actually looked pretty realistic :)
And 1280x1024 should be enough for anyone
which is totally what she said
I've had the pleasure of knowing several students and teachers who deal with the Acadia 'Advantage' program, which requires that all students carry a laptop.
It is a total farce. Ten years ago, Acadia was a respected arts university. Now it's an expensive Canadian Ivy League with lots of pretty rich girls looking for rich husbands. --A generalization to be sure, but generally speaking, accurate.
Let's talk specifics. . .
Students, if they want to attend Acadia, are required to lease a computer from Dell through the university. At the end of their time at Acadia, even though they have paid enough money through the 'lease' to have bought their computer outright, (usually more than once), they are not allowed to keep it. The computers must be returned. They are then refurbished and sold privately by the school at about $600 - $800 per unit.
Yes, there is logic in forcing everybody to work on a standard system; it would be very hard to try to offer hardware/software support to a legion of various laptops. And like a school uniform, nobody is left behind on the digital curve. All supposedly good things. But. . .
Dell is doing rather well by the deal, as are some people at the University. A lot of money was being collected, and it doesn't add up in the expenses. There is a scandal bubbling beneath the surface. In a recent teacher's strike at Acadia, one of the demands the teachers wanted met was to be able to see the financial records of the school so that they knew where the money was all going. --That and an answer to the following question: "Why is it when Acadia is the most expensive university in Canada, are the professors there paid the least out of all of them?"
The strike didn't do much good in this respect. Answers and open books are still being waited on, (without much hope for either being satisfied).
All the profs I've talked to have very derisive things to say about the 'advantage' program. Trying to give a lecture while half the students are surfing the web right in front of you is one of the more common complaints. The arts programs are still strong in music and theater, but it is a struggle. Everything in the school has become incredibly expensive, and the surrounding town has seen 300% inflation. Moods and attitudes have changed considerably in ten years.
You can't blame it all on the laptops, but the laptops are a symptom. The student union building once bustled with energy and lots of happy, talking kids. Now it is all but empty and quiet except for the clicking of keys and the odd grunt when somebody gets fragged.
So, my university has required laptops for a few years now, and there have so far not been any real issues. They offer an IBM laptop preloaded with office and various licensed programs for a discounted price (seeing as they get sold by the thousands). WiFi is all over campus no matter (for the most part) where you are, and yeah, assignments and things are starting to move to a network-wide system called blackboard(tm).
However, I will say that yesterday, blackboard was out for 6 hours due to a power failure in the server room. Don't worry, it's a good step as long as your University really wants to provide support (I.E. a technical information department where the re-image hard drives and the like).
I this might be a very bad idea. It is not about the security that you need to be worried about but about the lifetime of a laptop. First there is going to be the price increase since a typical desktop cost a lot more than a typical laptop ( and I not even talking about the insane reduction that most colleges get from Dell and the likes ). Once you go pass the higher price and lower speed there is the factor of are the faculty going to be allowed to take the notebooks home. If so who would pay for a notebook if it gets damaged? I can gurantee you that 8 out of 10 faculty members would prefer having a desktop if they are liable for the laptop damages. Plus if a faculty member is not allowed to take the machine home, what is the point of switching to a portable machine? As far as licencing goes I can tell you right now that students will not get any software for free because of the huge cost that it would be to the college. ( it all depends on the size of the college and the funding that you get but in most cases licencing for the whole student body is way too expensive ). All this is fine for the students since they don't get free software anyway. As far as servicing all these computers goes, well this is another can of worms. You will have to take extra care of the network as it would be easier for viruses to spread. A corporate grade AV software with enabled autoupdating and preferably a local update server would be a MUST. In my experience SAV does a great job ( it used to be called Norton AV Corp. up untill 2-3 versions back ). You will probably have to create a wi-fi network if you don't have one and deal with things like computer registration ( mac or otherwise ) which means more networking jobs or more chores for the current staff. My experience is from a school with about 15,000 students plus about 2,500 faculty. I can tell you that the beggining of the school year is hell with all the people trying to register their computer. We went to a web based registration system which reduced the load by a lot but there are still quite a few students having problems or not really computer literate so there is still stuff to do. If you can, stay away from simple mac registering. It don't work anyway. Ok if anything happens to one of the faculty notebooks I can almost gurantee you that you will need at least double the time that you used to, when you had desktops, to repair it. Laptops are not very service friendly and every time we used to get one for some sort of repair it stayed about a week at the shop. It was fine because notebooks were never used as primary computers at the school and noone complained. Also I am guessing that once you replace the desktops with laptops there are no longer going to be any student labs. I am not 100% certain but I think that this will turn out to be a mistake. When a student's desktop/laptop breaks down he/she can still do his/here homework in the lab but this will no longer be an option in your case. Don't get me wrong, I love notebooks and I work exclusively on one for the last year or so. However, this is for home use and plus I can fix everything that I break. Also mobility is a great thing but I like a lot more the way that Sun has done it than the way your school is about to. If you don't know about Sun, they use a personal key card that lets you unlock your desktop from any workstation in the company. Provided that this costs a lot of money and is probably not that suitable for a college, it is still a much better idea that going all mobile. If I had a say in this I'd say stick with desktops and maybe get several notebooks for key faculty members. As far as the student body goes, well forcing them to buy a notebook is gay but if they choose to have one it shouldn't be a problem to support it as far as internet connectivity and simple stuff like that goes. That's what most colleges do anyway.
The reason for Vista is that the Core Duo Apple laptops use EFS and don't have BIOS emulation. Therefore, XP won't run (or even install, I believe)
Chocolate milk and beer. Students and faculty are such slobs with equipment they didn't purchase.
I drank what? -- Socrates
I've worked with a program at a university that did something like this, but for only one major. Our solution was to hire enough tech-saavy student workers to run a help desk from 8 am to 9 or 10 at night, with between 1 and 3 people at the desk at any given time. You're gonna want to make sure that you work out a deal with your hardware manufacturers that'll let you send in the laptops for repair and then either send the college or the student a bill (depending on the terms of this program). In our case, all the laptops were Apples, and Apple did a great job of this: anything we sent to them we got back in a couple of days, and I think we even got a discount over what they charge the private sector for similar work.
Your student work can deal with software issues. DISK IMAGES ARE YOUR BEST FRIEND. Put together a known good configuration, with all the appropriate software, etc. Let everyone know that they need to make backups, on either a USB key or CDs of all their personal files.
Then, if there is a software problem that can't be fixed by less than thirty minutes of work, ask the person, then image their machine. Back up their documents if you can. If not, sorry.
You'll get into a quagmire if you try to support too many configurations. Pick laptops that will work for what you need, and give students that option if they want software/support from the college. Don't try to support hardware in house, it is a liability nightmare, and you won't be able to find students that are good enough to get it right with laptops in any kind of number. Keep the actual fixing to simple things like reinstalling a piece of software, or changing to the right network settings. If they've managed to do something more serious, IMAGE IMAGE IMAGE.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Yeah, I'm graduating from Acadia [http://www.acadiau.ca/ this year and headed off to one of the better law schools in Canada.
Dell actually deals with the laptops now... (I think they underpriced IBM a couple of years ago.)
I don't know how you'd do what you're trying to do with different types of laptops... Acadia issues the same type of laptop to every user, which allows the tech department to solve problems a whole lot faster. Write to these guys/gals; they'll surely have some solid recommendations.
Novell Networks provides the backbone for networking (from what I understand).
All the best!
You may like the idea of passing on the cost of computers and software to the students, but don't count your savings just yet. Electrical recepticles and power strips used by your lab computers probably weren't designed for 6 classes of students a day to plug in and out of. Same thing for network cables - (you do realize that wireless isn't going to cut it with lots of users accessing large pdfs, images, autocad drawings, etc.)
Also make plans how access and authentication is going to work for printing on campus printers and accessing network resources. If your labs are using windows CIFS for file/print you need to investigate converting your infrastructure to web technologies, Webdav, etc. You probably don't want the responsibility of student owned machines in your campus domain, but they probably need to access it which introduces a whole slew of issues you need to be ready to face on the first day of school.
The thing that always gets me about these oh-so-clever administrative decisions is that the students often have very little say in these proposed programs. Sure, most universities throw out some sort of blanket 'technology survey' under pretenses of allowing students to voice their opinions, but the decisions for technology overhauls like this are often cemented long before any student feedback is considered.
What I wish to ask--as a student myself--is, don't the people in administration think college is expensive enough without forcing the students to spend a large amount of money on a high-end laptop? Are they aware of student costs at all, or do they just not care? The statement that financial aid will pay the fee is ludicrous and hardly qualifies as a viable option: what about students who don't qualify, or don't get enough financial aid to fully pay for their tuition during a school year? You would have them pay more out of pocket for their tuition because a shiny new laptop is covered in their financial aid? Or would there be a provision for increasing aid--no doubt in the form of loans--to students who couldn't quite afford it? I know I'd certainly appreciate having my academic debt jacked up a few grand on mandatory laptops. Do you plan on compensating the students somehow in three years when the laptops will invariably be too slow to run the new-latest Photoshop or Maya, nevermind whatever OS they'll require?
No, this is a horrible idea. Let the students choose their hardware and you'll have far less of a headache on your hands. Offer the needed software for discounted academic pricing for students at home or in the dorms who want it, but allow anyone access to a computer lab with the needed software. In the end, you'll find it's not only an easier solution, but that you'll step on far fewer student toes in the meantime.
Hi everyone,
....
:)
thats just one possible solution....
1. Ask your administration department to spend 250.000 $ in the development of a Open-Source Multi-Boot-CD (similar projects running already based on Knoppix or Bart-PE, - yes it requires a MS-licences) including all required (for sure if possible open source based ) software packages.
Add all security you require and add restrict the user privleges. Make this CD running on IBM-based PCs and Apple.
2. Students who start with this CD there own private Notebooks or Desktops can establish a WLAN or VPN connection. Work Work Work
3. After finishing there work they can reboot and come back to there own locale installed favourite OS and use there notebooks for whatever they like.
4. This is the most important: Pay the Open-Source Community every year 50 % of the money you save by getting rid of all the computer-labs.
My two cents
CC. This might just work for an art school. E.g. in my case the idea of the OP would generate 90% of hacking-students trying to crack computers of other students or university servers.
Hmmm... maybe thats even a better way to teach rather then boring programming courses
I'm over at the University of Dayton, and for the past few years the school has been forcing the incoming study body to purchase laptops from the school. Arts students with Apple, but the majority of the students are stuck with Tangents. Now maybe Dell has a different system worked out to deal with large distributions of laptops and PCs, but the IT department here is swamped nearly 24/7 with problems from students. Students do so many unbelievable things to laptops, and depending on how large your student body is there it could end up just being a nightmare like it is here. I wish you the best of luck, but honestly I think you're in for one hell of a ride...
So? When I was in college I was 'forced' to buy a bunch of textbooks. They were my property, but the University mandated I used a particular set of books that the professors had chosen to teach from. It's really no different.
It is very different. First of all, you had the option to buy the books second-hand most of the time, reducing the cost of the books to you. There's not really a good option out there for buying a second-hand laptop that will be able to keep up with the latest programs (especially graphics and video). Secondly, you also had the option to take the book out of the library (school or public), and not pay anything at all. Please remember that the average college/university student doesn't have a lot of money. It's possible to budget in $1,000USD or more for textbooks -- it's even covered by many student loans and bursaries. But how about this kind of budget:
Mac 2GHz Intel Core Duo: $2,499.00
Microsoft Office 2004 -- Student and Teacher Edition (For Mac): $149.99
Adobe Photoshop CS2: $649.00
Total: $3297.99
That's the absolute minimum that an average graphics design student would have to spend, on top of textbooks. Doing any courses in animation or web design? Expect to spend $699 on Adobe After Effects or $999 on the Macromedia Suite. Video editing? That's $849 for Adobe Premiere Pro if you're running Windows or $1,299 for Final Cut Studio for Mac. God forbid you have to buy your another (larger) monitor, peripherals, an OS, or your course requires you to use Media 100 or Avid. Soon you're paying more for your laptop than you paid for your whole school year in residence (including meal plan), tuition, and possibly your entire school experience combined!
One of the primary reasons that schools offer computer labs is because most students cannot afford to buy the requisite hardware and software. Schools pool resources from the government and tuitions in order to get computer labs, which is something that an individual cannot do. Schools also get trememdous discounts on the products and liscences that they buy because they buy in bulk.
Please remember that many of us went through school on student loans and part-time jobs. Where I live (Ontario, Canada), they have decreased what the government-sponsored loans will lend out, and even bank loans (which have to be co-signed by your parents) are limited. The average student can hope to receive about $6,000CAD max from the government, and maybe another $8,000CAD from the bank, and, if you're lucky, a couple of hundred bucks a paycheck from a part-time job. This has to last you for lodging, food, tuition, and supplies for eight months. Can you imagine what a $3,000 (minimum) mandatory laptop will take out of your ability to pay for things like, say, food?
Also, think about the tech support necessary to keep everyone's computer running smoothly when every numbnuts out there has administrative privileges. Books don't exactly require support. If the school doesn't provide the technical support, then a large percent of student-owned laptops will be out for service so much that they're rendered useless for educational purposes.
"Laptops will be the death of us!"
I was working in a small IT department in Portland for Planar. We supported a sales force and it seemed like we were always trying to fix a broken laptop or reconfigure the software to work. As much as I love laptops, there always seem to be issues with the tweaky hardware used. Not to mention battery life shrinks over time. Bah, humbug.
Let's see.....I see many broken Dell's in your future...many many many. Apple is fine but lacks tools. Dell.....I'd probably have to quit. Gimme whitebox equipment any day over Dell's horrible quality and support.
Having worked at a college that most of the students had dell Laptops I saw a couple Dell laptops that had Duplicate MAC address.
I'd be somewhat careful with keyboards and potential repetitive strain problems. A physical setup that may work for one person may be difficult for another, particularly if the person has developed some sort of injury or irritation. Laptop keyboards tend to have shorter key travel, and that changes your finger motion compared to a full keyboard. Obviously the keyboard position relative to the screen can't be adjusted, which can also tempt one into settling on bad typing positions. The point isn't that laptops are necessarily worse or worse for everyone, but they're less flexible unless you're also willing to pay for docking stations, etc. With a desktop or a dock, you can get different keyboards, trackballs, mice, etc. for different users, and you get more flexibility in setting up workspaces. Certainly when I've had hand sensitivities, even good laptop keyboards have tended to cause more irritation than quality full keyboards. So, a suggestion to be somewhat flexible in meeting the needs of individual users.
They will be able to run Windows too.
-- Boycott Shell
When the school I work for started issuing laptops to students, we came up with some issues. The first issue that was noticeable on a daily basis was bandwidth useage. Lets say you have 300 desktops now, and you plan on switching to over 1000 laptops. You're looking at adding 800 machines to the network. On top of that, these laptops are going to be used more often and will consume more bandwidth than a typical lab computer (think p2p). Investing a bigger pipe is a good idea. You might also consider using something like a packeteer to control network traffic. A second issue has been supporting the new, larger userbase. This last year we took away administrative rights from the students. They were pretty pissed for a while, but they got used to it. Taking the admin rights away probably cut our time supporting students by 50 - 75%. Another observation is about wireless. I hope you plan on deploying to the dormitories the school runs. We deployed to common areas only (which includes the lobbies of dorms but only the lobby) and students were irritated that the wireless didn't work in their rooms. Four years later we're rolling out wireless to the dorms. These are just some observations I've made in the last 4 years.
There are a lot of naysayers here, but I am a student network admin. It doesn't matter what's out there, you just have to manage the network.
The computers will get bots and worms, and students will plug in wireless routers backwards and take out network segments. No different than any other network. We use vmps, so when a machine is doing bad things, it's MAC gets put in a vlan that can only talk to a Webserver, explaining that they are quarantined, and they can hit Windows Update. Wherever they go, the vlan follows.
The school probably already has a tier-1 help desk. The labs already probably had disk images, so they can be up and running again in 15 minutes if broken. Just do this with the laptops.
Otherwise, the students own the laptops, so if they are stolen or broken, tough luck. We have some anti-theft plate/decal that leaves some sort of traceable tattoo on our computers. If one turns up we know who it belonged to, even if the plate is removed without breaking the laptop. If someone wants to bad enough, they'll get it off. But stuff gets stolen sometimes.
Yes, this will be a lot of work. But that's IT, that's network engineering. Job security, friend.
Assuming you at least authenticate print jobs, maybe you can attach a yellow-dots watermark like Xerox does on copiers. Then have an operator load all the abandoned pages into a scanner at the end of the [pick interval] and charge a buck a sheet for abandoned print jobs back to the user's account.
That would cut down on waste but avoid an accounting nightmare for honest users. As for the wet t-shirt contest posters - there should be a non-technical remedy for that, same as if someone was operating a battery charging business out of a dorm room.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There are many ways to take something seriously.
They may not match yours.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I supported scientists of serious high caliber. If there was a Nobel Prize on their field of expertise (Geophysics), they would have been candidates or winners.
Well, this people had a hard time understanding the difference between a serial conection and an ethernet one for example. Or why they could not get stuff displayed back on their computers without an X server running.
ANd why should they? But to assume they are clever enough to do computing safely and securely is a big jump of faith.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Acadia University in Nova Scotia did this a few years ago. In fact, they included the cost of the laptops in tuition. (http://www.acadiau.ca/) Faculty hated it, because students would sit in class with their laptops playing games instead of listening to the lecture.
That's not the point at all, it's that someone with a Nobel Laurate has enough political power in the organization that they can have their own way whether or not it makes technological sense. Which means they don't have to put up with technological roadblocks that they do not like. I really don't see why it is so difficult to understand that an organization would treat someone of that level with extra care and respect? Now with that in mind, re-read my post.
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
That must have taken some time to do, what a waste of time!
Those cables are totally useless, especially as a lot of kit puts only plastic around the slots.
At the school I work in, we had a batch of thefts that involved simply ripping the lock cable out of the side of the laptop, and projectors.
Then presumably punting them on down the pub or whatever. It was an obviously stolen (covered in security marks) bit of kit, but it still went somewhere.
Funnily enough there was no investigation, and it seems that the management at the school was more worried about the box of chocolates that was stolen the same week!
That's related to the reasons I'm getting out of there as soon as I can.
-- You ain't seen me, right?
I am a freshman at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. It has been rated THE #1 engineering college in America for 7 straight years (among schools that offer no higher degrees than a master's).
Here, all freshmen are required to purchase a laptop through the school, who arranges for discounts, software and installation, and full maintenance. Every student, regardless of his major, gets programs including AutoCAD, Working Model, Solid Edge, MatLAB, Maple, LoggerPro, Microsoft's full Office Suite, and many more.
This year, we got Dell Precisions with Pentium M processors, graphics card upgrades, memory upgrades, and bigger hard drives. It costs a hefty $3,062, but with all the software we get, it is quite a deal. (Loan plans are available for the financially challenged.)
These laptops are handed out during Orientation Week, after they have all the registration completed and our user accounts have been set up for us. We also get free maintenance from the Tech Department. Need a new keyboard? Got it. Screen dies? New one. Personally, I needed a new DVD burner. Walked in, showed them the problem, and 20 mins later I walked out with a new drive.
The benefit of having the school require all students to purchase specific laptops, and making us order through the school as opposed to on our own, is that the Tech Dept can easyily fix any problem for everybody. If the problem is so bad that they need to have your laptop over night, they pop out your hard drive and stick it into a "loaner" model that they keep on hand and you use that until yours is fixed.
Now, not every student has the same laptop from year to year. They update the models every other year to keep up to date with the latest in technological advances. Students are also free to have other personal computers if they so desire. I have my own iMac in my room that I use for personal things, and I do my homework on my Dell.
This has been Rose-Hulman's practice for over 10 years now, and it works very well. In the main buildings, there is a wireless network available to those with a Rose-Hulman username and password, but in the residence halls, they prefer to let the students set up their own wireless networks. This system works very well. There are no actual computer labs, although there are some rooms in the Computer Science department that do have several desktops. As has been mentioned before, this cuts some precious costs.
Also, on the topic of safety: This school has an open-door policy. We are so much a family that people leave their computers, iPods, game systems, and other valuables in their empty room, unlocked and unguarded. I recognize that this is a benefit of being such a high-caliber school with a small population of students who are all very proud our school, and that not every school can be like this. One thing to consider, however, is that as long as every student has the same computer, the urge to steal one becomes much smaller.
All things considered, moving a school away from desktops and computer labs in favor of mandated laptops is a great idea.