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Laptops Required for Freshmen
An anonymous reader writes "Indiana State University will become the first public university in the state to require all students to have notebook computers, beginning with incoming freshmen in fall 2007. Guess which laptop is the preferred one..." I started bringing laptops to class around my Junior year. I'm unconvinced that they helped me with my grades.
And in breaking news, laptop computer theft suddenly surpasses bicycle theft at the university. Details at eleven.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Requiring a laptop will not help a student get better grades. Far too often people don't realize that a computer is just a tool which enables you to do something else more efficient. It is not the end all solution to every problem. Unless the computer is needed in the class or you suck at hand-writing notes there is no need for it (and no, IM the cute girl one row over doesn't count as a need). I've had quite a few college classes and I am willing to say less than 5% need a laptop as a course requirement. This seems more like the school is saying we are on the cutting edge because every student uses a laptop. Big whip, show me where this is definately improving grades, quality of work or anything else.
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Err, yes PowerBooks switch networks automatically just like the Thinkpad does. You still have to enter the network keys and any other required information to set things up. After that the prefered network gets used. I've configured wireless networking on both of the systems in question. There really isn't anything magical or special about either. Thus I have to label your statement as pointless Mac Fanboy Babble.
My guess is that there's probably a deal in there somewhere (as you mentioned, Lenovo) that takes advantage of the ignorance of parents who are basically footing the bill anyhow. I imagine that either mom or dad will say, "The school recommends a ThinkPad, and that's what were getting you. I don't want my little Nancy/Johnny to be behind any of the other students because we got them a computer that might not work. What's that honey? You say you like your Powerbook better? Nonsense, this new computer will work MUCH better, it says so right here in the information."
Or perhaps you have a student who doesn't currently have a laptop. What are they thinking? "Dude, yeah I'm getting a laptop. What kind? Hell if I know. All I know is that I've gotta have it for class, and the folks are payin' for it. I'm totally going to download porn while I'm in class. Yeah, sweet huh! High-Five, dude!"
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Something's messed up with your system. That's not how it works; the auto-switching features of OS X are quite "smart" in my experience (assuming you have it set up to join any available network when no preferred ones are connected). I think the default is to prompt the user when connecting to a non-whitelisted, unencrypted network, however.
That said, my corporate laptop doesn't do a horrible job of WLAN management either, although I use a 3rd party program rather than the built-in Windows tools to manage different connection profiles (it also turns the VPN on if I'm not on the corporate subnet).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Because you think Thinkpads are cheap? What world do you live in?
Cheapest Thinkpad: $750
Cheapest Powerbook: $1750
That's $1000. Go away.
I don't respond to AC's.
Yes, but in three years, the laptop will be so old and out of date, they'll have to purchase a new one.
I completed my undergraduate studies 17 years ago, and let me tell you, that Calculus 101 Textbook is STILL providing me with many nights of riveting thrills and spills. I re-read it at least as often as I re-read Lord of the Rings....
Why is this necessary?
About 15 minutes ago, I left my weekly project status meeting here at work. About 25% of the attendees are actively USING their laptop in the meeting. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a project leader playing Tetris during this meeting. So, if nothing else, playing games on the laptop in class will prepare the class of 2007 for their future life in the real world.
OK, Firsta disclaimer: When I went to a University, the only "laptop" that existed was a tray table you used when you were sick, and a "calculator" was also called a "slide rule". Anyway...
:)
In my opinion, there would only be one way a laptop would be useful, and that's if every one of your text books could be loaded on it electronically, thereby avoiding the need to lug books around all day to class. Of course, in the real world, this would create a problem, because publishers would put DRM on their ebooks, and make sure you couldn't buy and sell second hand texts. You have that problem to some extent now, of course. I remember a teacher who made sure to check each student's text book on the first day of class, to make sure it was the latest one. It turned out he was getting a cut from the publisher of everything sold by the campus book store in an under-the-table deal. A second teacher did the same thing, but he co-authored the book. I think he taught the Business Ethics class
Anyway, I question the need for forcing students to spend even more of their hard-earned money on a specific hardware/OS combination on something that really serves no purpose. Of course, I'd say the same thing about a college education in general, but I digress. If they want to use a computer for their term papers, fine. If they want to live in the previous century and use a typewriter (they still make them, right?), then more power to them.
I can see only very limited benefits to doing this, none of them for the student.
And for crying' out loud, don't enable wifi or cell phone reception in the classroom, either! Students don't need it, and the teachers don't (or shouldn't) want it. Teachers have enough to worry about as is.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I attend school at MSOE Where Laptops are not just required, you have to lease the damn things from the school (they're HP/Compaq laptops). There IS a decent amount of theft, but generally it's one of two things
:) ). But the power-supply pin on my laptop FELL OFF recently and so I took the beast in to get repaired (we're currently on break week). The laptop the school makes me lease is a HP Compaq nw8240. The loaner they gave me is a HP Compaq nw8000. I wouldn't really care about getting an older laptop (even if I hadn't gotten used to the wide-screen laptop), but they GIMP the loaners now because of the theiving! The wireless NICs don't work. You can't put the suckers in higher than 1024x768 resolution, and apparently other things... (I haven't used it much as it's craptacular). I imagine these are all software things and I could just blow the image away and put Linux on it... I'm just too lazy to do that for a laptop I shouldn't have longer than about a week or two.
:) ). There's occasionally the guy that steals his buddy's laptop to sell on Ebay to score some [insert drug type here] or to pay for tuition, but this is very uncommon. As it is, with a population of about 2000 students (all with laptops), the rate of laptop theft if about 1/month. Bike thefts, OTOH, are around 3/month.
Either it's some random person from the neighborhood (not a student) who wanders into a school building, finds a laptop someone left ungaurded, yoinks it, and then runs (with no time to turn the laptop off, let alone the wireless).
Or, it's students who need their laptops repaired. The tech-support guys tend to need your laptop for a week or two for even the simplest repairs, so students tend to wait until between quarters (think short semesters, with pathetically small breaks in between them, oh and there's three of them, not four) to turn in their laptop for repair. What happens? The student's grades come back during the break and the results are bad. They have to leave the school. So this angry, bitter, ex-student now is SUPPOSED to return the LOANER laptop they got when they turned in their regular laptop. Instead, a lot (apparently) simply keep the loaner whilst giving the school a one-finger salute.
I wouldn't really care about the theivery (especially the first kind, as I only leave my laptop alone in LOCKED labs with security cameras pointing at it.. and I back-up my stuff
My point of this post is that Theiving of a students' laptops are almost always done by non-students (If you are a student, you've already got a laptop
A laptop is useful for some but not for others
I used my 17" PowerBook G4 during the two and a half years of getting my MBA*, and I found it invaluable. I used it in three ways:
First, I converted the professor's inevitable PowerPoint presentations into PDFs and used Acrobat to take notes. (Admittedly I prefer when professors don't use PowerPoint. Do it on a marker board if you must write something. PPT is too lazy.)
Second, I used an application called InkBook along with a cheapo Wacom tablet which allowed me to do sketches and take notes which were parsed into English, a la the Newton of yore.
Third, I would often receive case studies as a PDF, so I could quickly take notes and refer back to them during class.
The benefit was I didn't have to carry around a folder with a bunch of paper notes, and I can refer to my notes even to this day. I'm very comfortable with using a computer as my primary tool during class, as I suspect many on Slashdot may agree.
However, I noticed that while everyone in class had a computer, few used it the way I did.
There was a lot of reading emails, playing games, or browsing the web during class (admittedly, when I got bored, I did that, too). Although some people took notes in PowerPoint, many people just printed stuff out and hand wrote their notes, so their laptop was just for messing around. If that's the case, then I don't see a benefit with requiring students to have a computer. If the person isn't comfortable with it, and the class isn't significantly enhanced by using it, then there's no point.
Plus, I'd be pissed if my school forced me to use a laptop of their choosing, rather than what I believe works best for me.
__
*hey! before you harass me, consider my relatively low Slashdot user ID. I will accept the taunting and mockings from only 87991 other users.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
This sounds like a known bug in some versions of the Airport software. You can fix it by re-running the Network Setup Assistant. From the Terminal run, open /System/Library/CoreServices/Network\ Setup\ Assistant.app. Then recreate all your connections. For some reason simply removing and recreatng the connections in Internet Connect or System Preferrences does not fix it, but running the setup Asistant does. Probably deletes some preference file. I never really investigated the details.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
"Cheapest Ford: $11,000
Cheapest Porsche: $45,000
That's $34,000. Go away.
Don't spout numbers without comparing Specs."
But if all you need to do is drive to and from class, what's the point of spending another $34,000?
Just like there is no point in spending an extra $1000 on a laptop when all you need is a web browser and an office suite.
Specs:
Can travel at the maximum legal limit in all states:
Ford: YES
Porsche: YES
Refuelable at all gas stations in the US
Ford: YES
Porsche: YES (but requires "special" premium gas at extra cost)
Passenger capacity
Ford: 4
Porsche: 2
Legal on all roads in US
Ford: YES
Porsche: YES
Servicable at most local service stations and dealers
Ford: Yes, extensive dealer network in almost every city
Porsche: No, limited dealer network, hard to find parts
Tell me again about those specs? Just like apple... except the macs can't fuel up with "standard" gas--- need special software.
For my first two years of law school I took a laptop to class. I'm utterly unconvinced that they helped me with grades. Laptops do allow students to take more verbose notes, as one can type faster than he can write. However I did not find this to be a benefit. If anything, greater verbosity to review for exams turned out to be a hinderance.
My last year of law school I got tired of carrying around my Dell clunkster. Some people had Palms and folding keyboards that they used to take notes. I considered going this route, but decided to reject it to try an alternative on a trial basis: pens and spiral notebooks. Light, easy to carry, no technical failures. It worked great.
On distractions: yes, sure, some people will use laptops to play games in class. These are the same people who would otherwise be daydreaming or drawing doodles. With pen and paper, I would daydream and draw doodles.
Finally though, laptops have the potential to improve class interactions and learning experiences. In law school a few students would use IM during class. Sure, sometimes they were gossiping, but often they were helping each other with the material that was being discussed. Another neat idea would be to have a chat room for the class, going on at the same time as the lecture.
But for the most part, class is just a waste of time anyway. Just a rehashing of reading material. In those cases laptops won't help anything.
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Link: The Carolina Computing Initiative.
-Will
"Interesting side note: as a head without a body, I envy the dead."
I am a freshman at Clemson, and wasn't really surprised to learn they required laptops when I applied. They encourage you to buy one of their Thinkpads. It does make the IT department's job much easier - they set them up with a dual partition, and when the students inevitably get the latest AIM virus it's a simple task to image over the C partition since all the device drivers can be standardized because all the hardware is the same. It's just like the way apple works, in my opinion.
However, they don't force you to buy a Clemson laptop - I'm typing this on a Asus Z71V, a great linux laptop, and I see about 1 out of every 5 or so people have a non-IBM laptop. Also, DCIT actively encourages dual booting into *nix and maintains dual-boot Ubuntu images preconfigured for their thinkpads, along with supporting an active Linux user group. Also, many of the workstations here run Solaris and if you take a comp sci class it's pretty much required you learn basic *nix commands. So it is a pretty good policy here, IMO. Forcing everyone to have a laptop - one kind or another - gives people a great tool to work with.
Hard work pays off tomorrow, but procrastination pays off NOW!
Yeah, it's the first state university in the state of Indiana, but it's definitely not the first.
I was a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 5 years ago and we were required to have laptops as well. And yes, UNC is also a state university.
Thinkpads were also the preferred laptops there b/c there was an arrangment made with IBM at the time. For students who couldn't afford it, it was available as part of their financial aid.
or engineering seniors trying to do CAD with a 4 year old integrated graphics card
It could be worse. It could be four years ago with a then state of the art integrated graphics card. We all know that CAD was a useless endeavor until NVidia graced us with last week's SuperGPU9000+. I would hate to think how barbaric engineering was back in the ancient days of the 3dfx.
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