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Innovative Uses for Educational Technology Funds? 232

Posted by Cliff from the spending-someone-else's-money dept.
RumGunner asks: "I work for a university, and we have a special 'technology' fee that is charged to students, intended to be used for focus on new technology of direct benefit to students either in the classroom or related educational/learning activities. Every semester there is a request for proposals on how to spend this money, and for the most part these proposals are fairly lackluster. Since I know there are a lot of .GOV and .EDU readers on Slashdot, I'm curious to see if anyone has any good ideas for large (or small) scale applications of new technology for the benefit of students?"
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Innovative Uses for Educational Technology Funds? More

Innovative Uses for Educational Technology Funds?

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  • At my school they invested in more bandwith, first thing you know, somebody rooted the server and put warez on the ftp...

  • Multipule T3 (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    T3's = More Gnutella = More Porn = Happy Comp Science Students

  • Campus-wide wireless? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Stiletto ( 12066 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @01:58PM (#2909960)

    If you have enough money, you can cover the campus with wireless access. This would be good for schools that haven't already wired every dorm and every classroom with CAT5.
    • I would say an encrypted wireless network, but being at an educational institution the encryption setting would be cracked/shared rather quickly.
    • Campus-wide wireless is fine...if the university could subsidize some of the cost of the cards. The U of Akron has campus-wide wireless but...the cards are 140 dollars! They require the Cisco Aironet cards.

      That's a lot considering that tuition has gone up 14.45% from last year (a 9% increase for fall and a 5% increase for spring).

      Considering that there aren't any more sections of classes...I don't feel that I am getting my money's worth. This is what happens when you build prisons instead of putting the money into education. And they wonder why graduates leave Ohio...
      -thedeacon

    • Re:Campus-wide wireless? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RC514 ( 546181 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @02:15PM (#2910032) Homepage
      Wireless networking on the whole campus is nice, of course, but it isn't educational if there is no educational content or projects which make use of the network. Looking at stories about the bandwith demand at universities, I guess the networks are mostly there (although not always wireless), but the on-topic content is missing. I'd say, put the money into virtualizing lecture material and developing new forms of presenting educational material. Some things can be expressed much better in an animation or interactive 3d-model for example, ways of presentation which are usually unvailable today.
      • Oh to have mod points and to give them to a person who deserves them. While the bandwidth greedy part of me wants a gigbit hookup to my room, and a pipe the size of something....large (can you tell I'm not an english major?). But the part of me that wants to learn wishs that there were better virtual classrooms, or at the least audio recordings of lectures and scans of all the notes on a intranet. Thats whats needed, not a network to make my p0rn gathering more efficent, but away to review lectures, or see what you missed.
      • It could be educational. Have a hacking contest. AFAIK it's still legal to hack your own network. Regardless of your opinions on the overall benefits of hacking, it still requires learning and implementation. It's wrong to strip a car in 20 minutes, but you gotta know what you're doing to make it happen.

        Anyways, even if nobody breaks into any servers or intercepts any transmissions, they'll still have learned a good deal about the protocols and the fundamentals behind how the network/servers work.
    • SUNY Morrisville has wireless access across the entire campus. They also have Cat5 in some spots.

      I think they were IBM's "Most Wired Campus", which I would say in the case of wireless is a misnomer. :)

    • The problem with this is not abuse...it's non-use. I'm here at Oberlin College, in Ohio, and we have a wireless net for parts of our campus. The idea is great and the development office loves it (read, "good advertising"), but the thing is, its so expensive to get the wireless modem/ethernet cards that essentially no one uses it.
      A better way to use funds would be to provide more help to students who don't have thier own computers. Like longer lab hours and more support staff, and better equipment there. That's my two cents (the rest of my money having gone to Oberlin, including "technology fee").

  • off the top of my head... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by feldsteins ( 313201 ) <scott.scottfeldstein@net> on Sunday January 27, 2002 @02:01PM (#2909972) Homepage
    1. online course materials via products like Blackboard (grades, tests, syllabi, lecture notes, discussions, etc)

    2. Wireless networking (encrypted and/or MAC filtered) in libraries and public places

    3. Wireless laptops, either for everyone or for "borrowing" perhaps at the library or other public places.

    4. Intelligent routing to prevent the gnutella users from sucking up all the bandwidth. You can do this without entirely blocking the ports, thus letting it happen but preserving the bulk of the bandwidth for other (presumably more legitimate) uses.

    5. Internet stations placed in public places for general email and web.

    6. IMAP mail (including a Web client) if you currently use POP.
    • 4. Intelligent routing to prevent the gnutella users from sucking up all the bandwidth. You can do this without entirely blocking the ports, thus letting it happen but preserving the bulk of the bandwidth for other (presumably more legitimate) uses. Before anyone bites my head off - I really don't do much file-sharing and I live off campus. These really are just my opinions. So here goes:

      For those living on campus the school's network is the only way to get broadband access. I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing most schools don't allow students to have DSL or cable installed in their dorm rooms. On top of that, don't schools with network running to each room figure that into the cost of living there? It seems generally unfair to penalize students who live on campus by restricting their internet access in anyway. Even more unfair at schools that require students to live on campus freshman year.
      • It's even more unfair to require students to access online course materials and then not provide the network infrastructure to do it. This is precisely the situation we found ourselves in. The culprit? Peer-to-peer filesharing. There was so much of it during certain days/times that nobody could do anything else reliably.

        We blocked the standard ports for the p2p clients and then issued a statement indicating that it was a temporary situation. Then we got to work on the "intelligent routing." Essentially we still allow these activities but there is a limit on the amount of total network bandwidth these activities can use. After setting this up, we reopened the ports.

        I think it's a great solution to a very common problem on university campuses, and quite fair to everyone.
      • We had unrestricted 100 megabit access to our OC-3 pipe in the dorms. I was told that two years after installing ethernet in the dorms our bandwidth bill had become 16 times greater than it was before dorm ethernet. The cost the University was enormous. Instead of blocking ports, which is generally frowned upon by the IT department (hey, they like P2P too!) they decided to implement "bandwidth shaping" which would throttle the bandwidth when excessive outgoing tranfer was detected, and would bring itself back up once the excessive usage stopped. I'm not sure how they're doing it but it was a huge disaster at the beginning (people were getting shut off completely). It seems to be working now I guess and I haven't noticed any annoyances, but I'm on a cable modem and would probably be unaffected anyway.

        I do a ton of downloading and I would say around 80-90% of it is legitimate (I transfer a lot of legal ISOs), so I'm glad I haven't been affected.
    • A good starting point, but all but one of your items deals with stuff outside the classroom. I'm the Director of IT for a engineering school in a large university. All told our school is one of the smaller schools in the University, with about 1,000 students. The university is pushing technology, but not to the point of being bleeding edge. Sure they do trials and such, but prefer to be right behind folks on the bleeding edge.

      For example, they are pushing Blackboard hard - just upgraded to the latest version which is much improved. The tricky part is getting faculty on board. Some jump on it, some don't have the time, and some just don't want to (very few) THe interesting part is that professors without course sites are being pressured by the students to get online. This is a good thing - its not that most faculty don't want to get online, they just don't necessarily see the advantage or if they do, aren't sure it's worth the effort or simply don't know whats involved.

      To help with situations like this, we have a university wide division whose entire purpose is working to help join technology with education. They host seminars to help faculty and students take advantage of technology available to them, etc. Even with this valuale resource, it still can be a struggle to get the visibility needed to reach the right people. Blackboard wasn't that great in past years, but the new versions really work to integrate everything and provide the student a portal to their class info as well as developing communities for each class (discussion boards, document repositories, mailing lists, and even grades, practice exams, etc)

      Wireless is a great thing. Our campus is deploying wireless quickly (our school finally got 100% coverage activated this month and a large part of the campus is covered), not just in dorms and educational spaces but in other places like the Quad, student center, etc. Now that the infrastructure is in place, the trick is using it. Many professors are wary of wireless in the classrooms (students surf the web during lectures) while other plan to embrace it. We're only now starting to work to get faculty to propose ideas for integrating wireless technology in teh classrom (say using PDAs and/or laptops to interact with the students, etc) Yes, there will be MUCH trial and error so it may seem like a waste of your money, but at least where I work, the intentions are clear - to use technology to improve the educational experience.

      Email kiosks - another great idea. We're currently working to deploy clusters of kiosks in our common areas using Linux and Shuttle's tiny SV24 box. $750 including a 15" LCD screen and touchpad keyboard - and prices are dropping. We already have high powered clusters of Sun workstations, but they're in rooms that aren't always where the students congregate. Again, we'll trial it and if its successful, deploy more.

      A lot of folks talk about requiring all students to get laptops - may work in some places, but I knwo we've just recently decided NOT to require them. 95% of our students already have computers, though not all are portable. ut forcing folks onto one platform would have caused too much of a backlash.

      On area we are actively researching is the classrooms themselves. Is a PC in a podium with a projector enough? Probably not (though its better than projector slides - we've only got 2 lecture halls with LCD projectors though we have plans to upfit many more of our classrooms in the comin gfew years) Other ideas being tossed about? Laptop carts, interactive classrooms with desktop PCs at each seat tied into a central control console where professors can bring up student screens to some their work as an example (and yes ensure they aren't surfing porn), smartboards which capture notes in realtime and also in files for upload to the class website, etc. The trick is a) figureing out which works best (or perhaps which infrastruture works best with which class) And of course, providing the resources to the faculty so they can adapt their courses for the future. Of course the other fun part is the faculty that don't want to change. At one point whiteboards were put up in place of chalk blackboards - a number of faculty complained so much that the whiteboards are now gone and good old blackboards are back up.

      So its not simple. Its going to take time. remember, educational institutions have limited budgets even when they charge special technical fees. As we all know, the HW is often cheap - the problem is hiring the people to integrate and run it.

      Often the most formidable obstacle to all this is, surprise, communication. SOme folks may already have killer software and apps put together to adapt coursework to new technology, but if its not publicized in a way that others can take advantage of it, things stagnate.

      Of course, this is all infrastructure. As you know, you can have a kick butt webserver, but you need CONTENT. If you spend $100K on retrofitting a classroom, it'll be useless until faculty have material that takes advantage of it and developing that material takes time. Sure, they can easily convert notes into Powerpoint slides - but thats no differnet than tossing premade transparencies onto an overhead - just more colorful. But imagine a class where the professor has interactive programs to demonstrate concepts, video clips showing phenomenon, feedback mechanisms where he/she can quiz the class on the current topic and based on their answers (push button a, b, c, or ,d), know if they are grasping it or if he/she needs to explain it further.

      This sounds like pointy head boss speak - but see if your school has a committee or organization looking at technology in education. We do and it works well. Granted its not speedy, but they deal with a number of the pressing issues related to technology in education. Their minutes and discussion papers are posted monthly. But feedback is limited. So see whats already going on at your school and make suggestions - they may get acted on - you never know! I know for us, all teh feedback we get is from faculty, not students. We have a single student rep on the committee, but our site allows for student feedback - we don't get much. If you like or don't like something being done, find out who runs the program and let them know. Be professional, but explain why something is or isnt' working - its the only way they know somethings up so they can try to improve it (or drop it all together)

      I know from where I sit, we're working on infrastructure. But the problem is classic chicken and egg. We don't have material already so we don't knwo what infrastrcture we need and we don't want to spend millions on the wrong type of equipment. So trial and error is the name of the game. Its slow, but hopefully we can identify the right mix and then push it out rapidly.

      No, I didn't come up with lots of new ideas, but right now all we have time to worry about right now is infrastructure and limited trials. The good news is the administration is holding millions in reserve/placeholders to spend the money where we prove it will work best - so technical improvement in education will happen, but its not gonna be a Net speed!

      • In regards to your focus on the inside of the classroom - you might be interested in a company called Smart [smarttech.com]. I've purchased and installed two of thier boards now and they're a big hit. They're a step beyond a computer with a projector. It not only allows educators to stand up in front of the projected computer screen and actually control the computer by touching it, it also allows them to put any student workstation up on the projector as well, such as for a class critique of student work.

        I went out of my way to arrange training for the faculty who would be teaching in these labs. Most of them showed up, a few still don't get it. But for the board is used every single day, that much I know.

        I think you mentioned Blackboard, too. We've been using it also and it's been great for us. We periodically arrange for 2-hour how-to sessions for faculty. Adoption of the system has positively exploded. Naturally there are plenty of faculty who will never use it, but as you say the students pressure them and we provide the training...so in the end more and more come to use it.
    • Those are good suggestions ... but theres clearly only one thing that can be done, neigh, must be done!

      ** Terrabyte 'o Porn **

    • 1. online course materials via products like Blackboard (grades, tests, syllabi, lecture notes, discussions, etc)

      Done.

      2. Wireless networking (encrypted and/or MAC filtered) in libraries and public places

      Done; and the wireless is in most campus buildings.

      3. Wireless laptops, either for everyone or for "borrowing" perhaps at the library or other public places.

      We have laptops to loan out, and students can get free wireless cards for their own laptops, so "done".

      4. Intelligent routing to prevent the gnutella users from sucking up all the bandwidth. You can do this without entirely blocking the ports, thus letting it happen but preserving the bulk of the bandwidth for other (presumably more legitimate) uses.

      We have a Packeteer shaper, so "done".

      5. Internet stations placed in public places for general email and web.

      That's been done for years already.

      6. IMAP mail (including a Web client) if you currently use POP.

      That's been done for a long time as well. What do we do now? In the midst of a buget crisis (Idaho State University [isu.edu]), we have spent a ton of money on technology. We are now installing these useless "smart boards" that came with state-of-the-art laptops that can copy the contents down (let me tell you, facutly are just lining up to take notes for their students [sarcasm]). It seems we may have too much money for technology? Is there nothing left?

      We also just finished installing our first all-Linux lab for the computer science department (yay!). We could have spent more money if we had used Windows, I suppose...

  • wireless (Score:2, Interesting)

    by m00nshyn3 ( 314525 )
    if your university doesn't have wireless internet access in at least the student common areas, you could look into it. on a larger scale you can use the money to investigate a campus wide wireless setup. this involves some non-obvious costs such as researching building materials that block/channel signals so you can use the buildings as antennas and shields.
    • a word of warning:

      at the school where i used to work on the network, one of the upper level (and some what ignorant) network admins jumped into wireless access. plan it out carefully first; he quickly saturated the main base station, and made all the computers using it attained ridiculously low speeds. due to this, the school heads (principals, etc; not network people) wrote off wireless access as a dead loss, and will not look into expanding it.

      so in other words, be careful to make the wireless systems equal to the wired computers. the non-network people don't care how cool & tech it is, just how well it works. if our school had given it a fair chance, it would have been incredible. but they didn't give it that chance...

  • Network drives (Score:2, Insightful)

    by James1006 ( 544398 )
    Giving every student an account on a Samba server they can reach from anywhere on campus would be good.

    It would eliminate the need for floppies and such.
    • At USB, our file serving is powered by SneakerNet (http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?snea kernet).
    • Our Uni has network shares. We started with 20MB quotas which was rediculous because it was almost maxed out by IE/Netscape/roaming profiles, Eudora data files, and the like. The quota is now at 50MB and it seems to be a much better amount. This was paid for with the student technology fee.

      We use Northern's [northern.se] quota server [northern.se] to implement quota on Dell Windows 2000 Servers. However, Quota Server seems to buckle under the pressue with 5000 students per box. We have a lot of problems with quota being screwed up. I think around 3000 people per box is more of a sweet spot for this particular product. We have under 1500 staff/faculty per box and it has very few problems.
      • This clearly deserves a higher rating because of the original nature of the idea.

        Sure, it's not uncommon on .edu sites anymore, but the lack of adequate storage for legitimate student use remains all too uncommon.

  • kinda hard.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by harakh ( 304850 )
    .. to give any direct advice since you didnt specify how large this budget is and what kinda stuff you already have at the university but..
    Personally i study at a university and things that i would like to have improved are the amounts of terminals around campus to check email from.. Maybe somekinda thin-client/server system that allows you to access the uni-servers to check mail/news (slashdot ;)).
    Also i doubt that very many universities have enough of they're lecture data on the web - which is really helpful. If the budget is large enough you could hire someone or a few persons to help the lecturers that arent so computer-literate to "digitize" lecture materials and extra material aswell as make good homepages for the courses with links to relevant sites etc. We have those on some of the courses and they are great! More of those would be really neat - preferrably from all courses.

    ... Just a few kind suggestions - please be gentle :)

  • Wireless network (Score:2, Informative)

    by km790816 ( 78280 )

    Iowa State [iastate.edu] has just deployed a wireless network [iastate.edu] on campus. It's been a joy to use, especially with my iPAQ. Although the academic benefits are debatable, it's certainly nice to be able to check Slashdot and use messenger during a boring lecture.

    The network is deployed [iastate.edu] in common meeting areas and in large lecture halls. I can't wait for spring so I can sit outside the library and check my email.

    I'm sure there are some cool things that can be done with a lecture hall full of people with connected laptops...I'm just waiting for someone tell me.

  • Database. (Score:5, Informative)

    by MindStalker ( 22827 ) <mindstalker@@@gmail...com> on Sunday January 27, 2002 @02:06PM (#2909998) Journal
    How about implimenting a .net/passport (but secure, and encrypted from admin eyes) style of database network. Where students can not only sign up for classes on the computers, which they can currently do in most universities, but can use this database to hold thier entire schedule of anything and everything they want and need to do. This database can be access anywere and everywhere on multiple types of devices, and teachers can input info into a students schedule as reminders in a safe secure way. The possibilies are endless. But as such a system is common in the workplace, getting students used to such a system, and getting computer students to create and admin such a system would provide many after college benifits.
    And have an open idea policy, especially amoung the computer students, so that they can impliment any enterprise solutions they can think of. And wireless, definatly wireless.
    • Most universities have this, in the form of online access to records and then seperate packages like Blackboard.

      However, the briding of the two really needs to be done and to be done seamlessly.
    • I've seen blackboard mentioned, but that's normally just one part of the puzzle. Blackboard doesn't handle all of the class registration part of the puzzle. There is one, called 'Banner' from SCT, which handles it, but from my personal experience, it's a pain in the ass, as every upgrade to the system requires re-applying your configurations to it. [Which might take multiple man-years to apply for some colleges]

      Supposedly, PeopleSoft has a module specifically for educational institutions, but I've never seen it. I also know that there was work being done up at Harvard back in 1996 for basically what you said above. I have no idea what ever became of it.

      As for getting students to use the system -- students have a 4 year turnover. You can get an over 95% compliance in 4 years just because they don't know what the old system was. Your problem lies in administration. And you can't have students do this work, due to restrictions by FERPA. It would have to be tightly controled by the Office of the Registrar or the equivalent office.

      And as a person who was one of those students making enterprise solutions in the mid 1990s, I'd have to say that student run projects are bound to fail in the long run for larger instutions, due to the lack of documentation, and incorrect dependancies on legacy systems. Although students may make good programmers, major projects need to be led by full time personel who are directly responsible for the project.

      (and as for wireless...my university was one of the test beds for Richochet in 1995. Damned nice system for $300/yr at the time... too bad they went under)

  • Little innovation right now + many lazy people = (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27, 2002 @02:07PM (#2910001)
    There's very little "new technology" coming out, scheduled every semester, that benefits students. Five years ago, just having computer labs probably would have been sufficient. These days, when the students all own computers, pagers, and cell phones, all the University can really do is provide connectivity.

    There's no new technology that will allow the students to learn more, faster, and have a higher comprehension.

    There is, however, scant use of existing technology. Why aren't all syllabi online? Can't past lecture notes and sample tests be posted online? How come half the universities still make students stand in line to sign up for classes? Why do you have to wander around with a slip of paper to drop or add a class? How come so few classes are taught online? I'm not meaning real-time, but a learn-at-your-own-pace? People like me, who have jobs and families and no good University nearby, want to take extra classes, and have the money, but can't find anyplace reputable to offer the courses.

    There's little innovation because most people don't get what to do with it, or they aren't willing to spend the time to do it. I know of 3 dozen professors who received grants to make their classes available online, and in the end, all they had was about 20 pages of static HTML pages, which were never updated, became stale, and then were removed from being online when the web server was upgraded.

    I'll end this with the worst funding request I ever read (and you're going to read it all):

    "Here's a list of the things we want. (You don't need anything more than this, do you?)"

    Attached was an excel spreadsheet with items and prices.
    • i think that there's one cheap thing that can be given to all p2 laptops w/ wireless pcmcia running gnu/linux that is my suggestion
    • Online class availability seems to depend on your major. As far as I can see, private business schools (even non-profit) are pretty good about this, and seem to assume that their students are working. Public schools aren't like this, and my private technical university isn't like that.

      My wife's an accounting major at Davenport University, and she has plenty of online classes available. One of my coworkers is an IT major at the same school, and hasn't gone to a classroom for two years. I, however, am a CS major at Lawrence Tech. U., and it appears that the only class I could take online is "Technical and Professional Communications", which is required for all students. Even for that class, though, you still have to show up four times for presentations.

      I think Eric (the IT major) still has to go to campus occasionally for administrative stuff, but otherwise he might as well be taking the classes from Hong Kong.
    • However the technology the students own at home, will be geared towards being easy to use, and won`t require much, if any, learning to use. If all someone does is click on quake.exe, play the game, crash, reboot, click quake.exe etc etc, they will never actually learn anything usefull. It`s the job of education to teach people that there is more to computing than just playing games, and to show them how to correct things which are wrong, And this can more easily be achieved in a lab environment, where the university has the resources, such as multiple hardware architectures and a wide range of very different software. Afterall, if you teach someone to look for the options they need, rather than showing them exactly where a particular system keeps those options, they will be much more able to adapt to differing software/hardware environments.

  • top of the line innovation: (Score:4, Insightful)

    by augros ( 513862 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @02:14PM (#2910028)
    you can't beat this: stop charging them the tech fee. i paid it all four years and got nothing but crappy half-implemented services like "blackboard" (an assignment/notice/expensive software that only CS professors were willing to use/schedule web application). here's my advice, if you don't know what you're charging a fee for -- don't charge it!!! how would you like a government-gizmo-thingy-tax?
    • ...than put up with my status quo. Allow me to outline it briefly:
      - The school board turned down a request for a $100 budget allocation in order to buy more computer paper by the head of our school's computing department. Now, if you want to print anything, you need to bring your own paper.
      - All computers in the school share a single ISDN line. At peak times, i.e. the only times that we're allowed to be in the media center, we get a throughput of about 5 bytes per second.
      - Except for a few iMacs that were donated last year, all the computers are 486s with 8mb of memory, running win95.
      - The school was awarded $100 per student for being an "A" school. There was a referendum among the faculty as to whether to spend 90% on bonuses and 10% on technology, or 100% on bonuses. I'll leave it to you to guess how that turned out.

      Basically, at the high school level, technology is essentially a zero budget operation. I would MUCH rather pay an annual fee for the right to use the computers than put up with what we have now.
    • let me clarify my position a bit: yes, a fee would be fine if the proceeds are to be used legitimately for known needs known in ADVANCE that cannot be met via tuition. although these ARE rare, some schools need to charge a fee for a good connection, computer paper, or for software that they believe that they will need, and don't have enough funds from tuition. but charging a fee and then saying, "now what are we gonna blow our cash on THIS year?" is just wrong.
  • I'm one of 5 student members on the final Tech Fee committee at my university (SPSU [spsu.edu]). One of the problems we've run into isn't the lack of good ideas, but the lack of faculty/staff on the lower committees that shoot down some good ideas before we on the upper committee get to vote on them. Granted, I've seen some frivolous proposals for stuff that we really don't need, and I would vote them down in order to get more long-term projects funded that will benefit more students. For example, it took us 2 meetings just to decide whether or not to fund a 3D printer for rapid prototyping in the MET dept. It was a large ticket item, but it would make things so much easier for the students to make a quick prototype instead of the time-consuming milling of a real part.
    The biggest ideas that I see coming up this year are requests for wireless access in student common areas, and increased funding for lab staff (so we can keep the brand new labs open longer). Hopefully this year we'll see the students submit more proposals, as the most we commonly see are requests from faculty and staff. (We divide the available funds into thirds, for IT, Academics, and Students--and the students section always comes up short with proposals.)
  • If you make the pipe bigger, they will fill it.

    All a college student wants is more bandwidth to download thier divx, mp3's, and warez. So do the right choice and invest in some dark fiber links!

  • Why not give the money back? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bruenor ( 38111 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @02:19PM (#2910045)
    I know that this will probably be a completely foreign idea for anyone in education or government, but why not give the money back?

    If you have to ask on Slashdot on how you should spend the money then I can only imagine one of two situations. Either your technology infrastructure has everything you need out of it, or you/your staff are unable to see what it needs and you should find jobs you are more suited to.

    If it is the former, then why not refund the money back to the students who paid it? As a current taxpayer and recent student I am sick and tired of the waste of my money that occurs in the system by people spending money whimsically on unneeded expenditures. I'm sure those of your students that are working hard to pay their way through school would agree with me.

    I can only speak from a U.S.A. perspective, but schools and government both seem to suffer under the idea that they ought to spend our money not because they need it, but because they can. The thought that you need to look for blue sky projects to spend the money on just because you have it sickens me.
    • I think you're being a bit unfair. A vital part of budgeting and implementation of new solutions is evaluating options. So the last project was completed. In order to keep providing students with the best possible service, then new projects need to at least be considered. If you left it up to some administrators, then a lab of 6 pentiums might well be "everything we need out of it."

      This is one of those areas that requires constant revision and reevaluation. It would be irresponsible to _not_ see what other universities and other people are doing, to see if anything can be learned by that.

      If, at the end of a re-evaluation, it is discovered that there's nothing that would benefit students and instructors on which to spend money, then, perhaps, you can find a way to refund the money.

      I am sorry that you are sickened by a person attempting to solicit ideas from the broader community on how to improve his campus. It seems to me just the thing a responsible administrator should do. Oftentimes, you don't know that you need something until you find it. When my undergraduate school put up the classes server (homebrewed WebCT/Blackboard-equivalent) four or five years ago, only two or three professors had any idea what to do with it. After the years of development, though, 70% of courses have materials there, and hundreds of students access them on a daily basis. Had no one looked around and said, "well, would it be worthwhile to explore this solution?" five years ago, the university would just now be trying to implement something, leaving it far behind its peers and without the infrastructure to meet the demand of students who like to have everything available on-line.

      Having that consistent funding gives workers the flexibility to try new things and innovate.

  • Invest in open source (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @02:19PM (#2910047) Homepage
    Use the money to pay students to work on open source projects. This kind of stuff would be a win-win-win: student gets paid, university gets useful software, open-source grows.

    Example: My college needed an emulator to teach assembly language to students, and I SOOO wanted them to have an undergrad build one and open source it.

  • ask the students (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jman sr ( 125377 )
    After all, the money does come from them. Try putting up feedback pages on your website and see what areas the students feel are lacking in your IT department.

    Secondly, do research on whatever you decide to do, and then discuss it with the students in some way. My school attempted to implement a one laptop for every person policy-- until they announced it to the students. The students protested so loudly that the plan has since been put on the backburner, indefinately.
  • Let's assume that the fee is setup like ours is here: $100/semester.

    Now, I'm sure a large school could get a deal with dell/compaq/hp for say $800 - 4x$200. If the student leaves early, they either turn their laptop in or they pay the rest for it. Otherwise, it's theirs.

    • Re:Laptops. (Score:2, Informative)

      by ddillman ( 267710 )
      You're sure, are you? Obviously you know nothing about it. Since I work (IT staff) in a Technical College that now has several programs using exclusively laptop computers, I think I have a clue here.

      First problem with your 'idea' is $800. Any laptop you're gonna get for $800 is not worth the effort currently. Second problem: Even if you get that $800 laptop now, it'll be well obsolete long before the end of that 4 years. Realistic laptop costs are still over $2000 for something worthwhile that will last long enough to be worth the trouble. Don't forget, you'll need to add infrastructure to support those laptops, either wireless or wired jacks somewhere, preferably many somewheres. Oh, and staff? Add at least one or two IT staff members to support those folks.



      Now, if you're talking a public sector institution, you're likely going to also have to deal with a public bid situation for who gets to sell you the laptops. Better cut your specifications pretty tight, or you might end up with some fly-by-night vendor that can't support you. Even for major vendors, arrange spares on-hand, because overnight shipping frequently isn't, and students paying that kind of money for a laptop will get pissed in a hurry if they don't get to use it. Oh, and are you leasing, or purchasing? If leasing, is it a buyout lease, or Fair Market Value? We did a FMV, and found out that if we still wanted to buy them it would be $1000 per unit after two years. I don't think those units are still worth $1000. This issue only gets worse after 4 years.



      I could come up with more, but that should at least give some idea of the problems faced when we went through this.

      • Here [gateway.com] is a laptop for $1000. Just one. The first I could find.

        At our school, the $100/semester is expicity towards equipping the computing centers in the University, and making sure that they have enough systems for everybody. The support staff is paid for by other monies.

        Now, I'm not going to attempt to solve the "Low-bidder" or "Bad-spec" jobs-- these are completely different and impossible problems that happen any time money is spent. And as for "being obsolete" -- what does that matter? If a laptop is useless in 4 years, who care? Exactly what can you buy that will not be obsolete in 4 years?

        And as for people and maintenance, I'm not saying that the University needs to run an exchange program, just have the students deal with the manufacturer and have a waranty. if they break it, they pay for the next one. No big deal.

        Yes, there are problems, but it should be looked at as a solution, even if it means all the cushy IT people might have to have there hours cut.
  • I'm sure there will be many suggestions of cutting edge technology: wireless, giving every student a Palm, etc.


    I think it's important to remember that most students aren't interested in the cutting edge. They want stuff which just works. (This is why people use Windows and Macs.) Sure, you could give students a palm-sized Wifi-enabled device but then what? Too few students are nerdy enough to use it. Heck, a significant percentage of them don't even own their own computer and are very content to type their semiotics papers at a nearly computer cluster.


    Perhaps a better use of the tech money would be something like recording lectures and posting them in a popular streaming-media format for later playing. This would be immediately accessible to everyone, not just those students who want to screw with SSIDs.


    The point is this: /. readers don't like to contemplate the lowest common denominator -- it reminds them of Windows. But to use the money to cater to just the CS or EE students sounds like a waste.


    BEN

  • TWiki Web (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Robert Frazier ( 17363 )
    I experiment here. Why should you decide at all? Give them a TWiki web (wiki web), and see what they do with it. The idea, I take it, is to give them room to take chances, to explore and to make mistakes.

  • Spend it on people! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by melquiades ( 314628 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @02:29PM (#2910085) Homepage
    It seems like almost all of these lackluster "tech in education" ideas are focused on hardware -- and totally miss the point, not only of technology in the classroom, but of how all learning works. While it is a disgrace that so many schools have such out-of-date technology, it's much more a disgrace that so much technology, so costly to schools, is essentially useless.

    At colleges and universities, hardware has a clear purpose: students need to do research and write papers. There's a very high demand for that, even if technology isn't playing a direct role in education. And even there, it's often the case that hardware-focused programs waste money.

    But in K-12 education, this problem is huge. It's one of the many bitter jokes behind Microsoft's school donation proposal: you can't just plop a lot of hardware in the middle of a school and expect magic.

    Guess what? Computers do not magically make learning happen. Students aren't going to get anything out of computers unless either (1) they have an engaged, tech-savvy teacher who finds ways to use computers effectively as a teaching tool, or (2) they have the opportunity to experiment on their own, without having the computers locked off, crippled, or kept off limits for unstructured learning. For hardware to be useful, students need available expertise and, above all, access.

    So, I'd suggest spending tech dollars on people. I'm thinking mostly of K-12 here:
    • Hire non-paranoid sysadmins who know enough about security to open up computers for student use. If technology is inaccessible, due to either technological or physical controls, it's a waste. Students need to be able to experiment to learn.

    • Give teachers technology training (if they want it -- don't shove it down their throats).

    • Bring in full- or part-time experts in technology fields to teach technology subjects: programming, graphic design, desktop publishing, system administration. Bring them into the rest of the curriculum, so that (for example) if students are publishing a magazine, they have access to the desktop publishing person.

    • Such experts are often (obviously) expensive. But there are many decent people who are willing to volunteer part-time. Hire a technology volunteer coordinator, and give them a budget they can do something with.

    • And, for heaven's sake, pay teachers a decent salary.
    • I agree! well-spoken.
      As I was leaving high school, some self-seeking politician had decided to "put a computer in every classroom!" So they went through the trouble of doing just that... the result?
      The sole use of this vast network was taking class attendance, and 80% of the teachers couldn't even accomplish that! The biggest problem in any network is the ignorance of its users - educate the users.
      Go out and tell the people!

      der_m

    • Re:Spend it on people! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @03:30PM (#2910338) Homepage
      They cant / wont.

      I applied several times to K-12 schools, large K-12 schools to be the sysadmin/netadmin/it/is guy. There are hundreds of offers out there and hundreds of jobs out there for this position, even right now they are there.. problem is that the schools want to pay about the same that McDonalds or burger King pay's for someone to say "you want fries with that?" but expect 15 years expierience (one I saw and made me die laughing said "requires 5 years expierience with windows 2000") and some even try to require BS or MS in computer science. and these positions are NEVER full time. they are 20 hrs a week part time so they can avoid giving you benifits.

      the K-12 schools who have a clue hire a real fulltime person, or have an awesome CS teacher who does it, or even better, has a student run IT department...(yes dorothy it can happen and happen well) but they are very very rare.

      Problem is that many teachers unions also BLOCK hiring of these tech people or impose insane restrictions.(and the salary is part of that too!)

      Getting more people in the K-12 schools to manage the technology is great, it's an awesome idea. but it wont happen until you get state or federal mandates forcing the schools to put a person there. Because they would rather increase the coach's salary or spend it on new shiny sports gear instead of trying to actually educate the children.

      • Re:Spend it on people! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by melquiades ( 314628 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @04:04PM (#2910452) Homepage
        problem is that the schools want to pay about the same that McDonalds or burger King pay's for someone to say "you want fries with that?" but expect 15 years expierience

        K-12 schools are invariably on a completely unworkable budget. Thus the "bitter irony" of Microsoft's school donation plan, and so many other technology grants: how much good can it do to plop machines the middle of a school when the facilities are in disrepair, the administration is understaffed, the classes are large, and teachers are underpaid?

        It's true, both K-12 schools and their donor often fail to understand the true costs of technology.

        Problem is that many teachers unions also BLOCK hiring of these tech people or impose insane restrictions.(and the salary is part of that too!)

        Thus the last item in my list -- "for heaven's sake, pay the teachers a decent salary". When the salary pool is way too small, there will be bitter battles over it, and you end up with these silly things that teachers' unions do. Have you ever heard of a programmers' union imposing a restriction like this on the salaries of sysadmins? ;)

        • Re:Spend it on people! (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Lumpy ( 12016 )
          Exactly! and there is one thing I failed to mention... the 2 schools that I observed that had a working IT program were private schools. (tuition was $200.00 per month per child... pretty darn cheap) Every student was issued a laptop and Internet access at home was required (parents had to supply that) Starting at the 8th grade students could take classes in the It department at IT "employees". granted every student that left the one school that is closest to me graduates very well educated students... which is a drastically different from the public schools. The ONLY way to get the public schools up to speed would be to get the state governments and fed govt to increase funding. (add to that local funding also.) but in america, education of the children is at the bottom of the priority list below cable tv rates and programming, snack foods, and porn accessability.... Makes you love this country eh?

    • The main problem in universities is where computer support sits in their status hierarchy: At The Bottom. Definitely below the departmental secretaries, possibly above the janitors. In some departments, computer support was in fact done by certain janitors that volunteered to change the backup tapes, got root, and took over from there.

      CS teaching and research is considered a cash cow, but their contribution is actually not taken seriously as part of "the life of the mind." The administration will gladly take half or more of the money they bring in, and would rather spend it on the campus landscraping than on the network infrastructure. The students and faculty demand better computers and better support, so what does the administration do? Levy another student fee to pay for it!

      But where did that 50-60% in "administrative overhead" on grants and contracts that supposedly goes to pay for the infrastructure, including the, uh, network? Oh, into some pet project of some kiss-ass assistant dean of liberal somethingorother, as usual. Painting the Roses Red.

      So now you have a shiny new pot of money to spend on computers. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. It will become yet another bone of contention for yet another round of stupid power games, and the person that gets stuck with making what's little left at the end of it all work--you know, the guy or gal at the bottom of their hierarchy of prestige and power--will get all the blame for all the delay caused by their power struggle and indecision, and will be caught in the middle of their stupid games.

      The students, who have paid for it all, will get nothing, if anything, out of this as usual.

      Except for those lovely expensive full-color glossy printed brochures put out by the the Wife Of Dean So-And-So working in the University of PR office describing, in extremely vague marketing terms, all of the benefits of the their selling out to Microsoft and accepting tons of M$ educational licenses for half price, the wonderful deal that she oh so sucksessfully negotiated -- when they could have gotten linux for free.

      You can come up with all the creative ideas you want, but the above is what will actually happen.

  • . . .and I would assume likewise for most universities that provide comupting resources to students.

    Every quarter students here are charged a 'Student Technology Fee' on their tuition bill. This money is then dispensed by a committee of students, staff, and faculty towards educational technology projects.

    Most of the money has gone towards building some excellent general-access computing labs for students. Our school has a glut of computers for student use--compared to others I've visited, there are no time limits, printing is cheap, and despite a growth in student body size most days you can come into the library and sit down at a computer.

    In addition, there have been some 'questionable' purchases, in that exhorbitant amounts of cash have been funnelled into machines I wouldn't think are worth it. Examples are buying many of the mac g4 cubes instead of regular macs, along with those huge LCD displays. Don't get me wrong--I love the displays, but at the same time each one is the equivalent of 4 computers.

    So in sum, if you want to spend student money on educational techology, BUILD MORE LABS! Spend the money the most efficient way possible in order to server the most students effectively. If your school has any need or projected need at all for more computing seats, give those your first priority. Going from a school where the labs were too small to the one I'm currently at demonstrated just how important--and NICE--it is to have close to enough seats to serve the student body.

    Just my .02. . .
  • As a student at a mid sized school. The technology fee has turned into a small slush fund. I personaly send a proposal and it was later denyed. I think a WAN for on campus and a limited area of off campus housing would give better access and allow alot of students to use the resources from many access points.

    -Eyempack

  • Network backup service (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @02:36PM (#2910105) Homepage
    It's a bit hard to make suggestions without knowing what your budget is and what you already have, but I'll give it a shot.

    Other posters have suggested a file server so that people can access their files from anywhere in the university. I'd extend this by adding an automated backup and recovery system.

    Make your daily/weekly/monthly backups as you normally would, but store the backups in a random-access form. Set up a web interface to allow people to browse the backed-up copies of their files and retrieve them.

    It might sound like a small thing, but I've found many times that I'd like to look at an old version of a file, and I'm sure other students are no different; the point isn't so much to provide a backup service as it is to provide a file rollback service.

  • ??? (Score:4, Redundant)

    by _typo ( 122952 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @02:36PM (#2910108) Homepage
    Let me get this straight. You charge them a "technology fee" *first* and then dedice what get's done with it?

  • Online Services (Score:3, Informative)

    by closet_subversive ( 311696 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @02:40PM (#2910117)
    While it is probably more oriented towards graduate students and faculty, online journals directly linked to our libraries search pages were a great addition. IEEE and physics journals tend to be used by a large number of students and might be a place to start.
  • The nature of the proposals wasn't explicitly stated in the question posted, but our University has a similar proposal-based system through the "Center for Instructional Technology." I am on a steering committee that deals with the proposals and money expenditures.

    The proposals are to be entertained from faculty, students, and teaching assistants; they are looking for new and innovative ways to use technology to promote learning. The budgets in question are usually a few thousand dollars per proposal.

    For instance, say a biology professor has an idea to use a wireless network and bunch of PDAs to use out "in the field". Each plant in a greenhouse or out in a field has an identifier next to it; as students walk around the field they can learn about any plant they find interesting by using their PDA to immediately research it over the wireless network, either querying a remote database or accessing web pages.
  • Remove the bandwith caps from the resident networks.

  • Little Things (Score:2, Insightful)

    by that_guy ( 33618 )
    My school (Oregon Tech) [oit.edu] has a similar fee that we pay, but it isn't applied to innovations or research of new technologies, but rather improving the existing infastructure. Since it started we went from unwired dorms to 10Mb. Some wireless beta programs were added, and best of all we got our own T1 for student access. (previously it was just dial up in the dorms. Ten modems for 300+ people) None of these things were very impressive, (maybe even lackluster) but they helped improve campus life 100%
  • From what I've seen, often times people in areas of authority (computer lab monitors, etc) don't understand technology well enough to implement anything innovative. Hell, they have a field day getting what we have to work. For example, our school network is to the point where if you were on floor 5 in a dorm hall, you'd have access to workgroups on floors 1-3 and 6, but not 4, and 4 would have access to workgroups on another dorm hall. This really gets annoying when you need to access an account on a school workgroup, and can't access it while the guy on the floor above you can.

    Digressing a little bit, is there really a need to implement new technology? At least from what I've caught in the news, most of the stuff coming out these days are either upgrades to software schools should have anyways, or useless tacky crap (palm pilot update) that really is more suited for individual fetish than education as a whole. Web pages never being updated, annoying phones going off in class, perhaps money would be better spent showing people how to use the tools they already have instead of bringing in a truckload of more problems.

  • MP3s of all lectures. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by vkg ( 158234 )
    Why? Not just because you might miss a class, but also for reference after the event.

    Why MP3 rather than video?

    Simple: cost. You could take a tiny slice of the tech budget and wire every auditorium and classroom for sound, and serving the files is no big deal (96KBMP for voice sounds like a CD).

    The problem which this leaves is blackboards / whiteboards. I'd suggest two possible solutions, in keeping with this low-tech approach.

    1> Webcams which take a picture of the board every five or ten seconds.
    (Pros: cool, cons: more complex, sync. with audio a problem).

    2> One of those funky systems which record where your pen is on the whiteboard and produce gifs from that data.

    Either solution is expensive, relative to sound, however, so mebbe the right thing to do is just to skip it.
  • Being in university myself, I'd like to see a few things changed at our school.

    The first would be to hire someone full time that runs the web servers. I almost failed exams because they were down 4 of 5 days, and I needed some information from them. Its nice that they want to let students run the point and click windows environment, but it just isn't stable enough for their use.

    The 2nd thing I'd love to see is more materials for the profs to use. Many will occassionally bring in their 486 notebooks and try to show us something with a projector from it. Of course they crash, and are awfully slow. All the content is also on their harddrive, and they have no wireless access. Each prof should be able to have a wireless network computer with them, and the projector to go along with it. Overheads are way outdated for the kind of applications engineering students use.

    Of course, the dream is for the school to have notebooks for students. Our tution price is huge compared to the cost, and when we factor in our textbooks it might even be more benefical and cheaper to have just laptops for everyone. Many of our profs just wish everyone in class could have one, as it would really allow us to do things right.

  • My thoughts (Score:4, Insightful)

    by macdaddy ( 38372 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @03:01PM (#2910182) Homepage Journal
    I too work at a university and the question has come up here before. It's already been suggested but wireless is a good way to go. Another might be to raise disk space quotas. More bandwidth is good but you also have to take care of what you buy. ie, buy a Packeteer to go with it. More lab machines. Better lab machines. Laptop checkout. NIDS to help better security. Minimal support of a local gaming server for the dorms. I know it sounds unusual and doesn't sound like it supports education, but really it does. Everyone needs to upplug from reality every so often--students included. Kids love gaming. Hell I love gaming. Netadmins hate gaming over the 'Net connection because of the bandwidth demands (I'm a netadmin). Supply some resources to have one local to campus that can only be accessed from the campus. Donate it to the SGA and let them admin it. Create a technology resource center where students can reserve time to use high tech stuff like fancy scanners, CD burners, etc...

    Here's a thought. Ask the students what they think their money should be spent on. :-)

  • Do's and Don'ts (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've worked in IT at the Univ Oklahoma and now a small private college. Here's my experience and advice:

    Don't charge a technology fee, it just gives students one more thing to whine about. IT should be driven by an institutional needs basis so you can get the biggest bang for your buck. Those typically are more network storage space, more mail server space, online enrollment/course content, and reliable connections.

    Wireless: Us tech geeks like to shout "wireless" as the solution to everything, but hardly anyone at the Univ Oklahoma used the wireless. Students would rather have a fast wired connection. If their dorms are not switched ethernet, you need to implement switching ASAP.

    Email: Give everyone decent mail storage and access via a web client such as the free squirrel mail app (squirrelmail.org)

    Network storage: We just installed a new raid array on our OSX servers which will give each student 100MB. Our next step is to get Samba and FTP up and running on those to allow access anywhere.

    Online enrollment/course content: If your only new IT development is online enrollment, the students will appreciate you. My recommendation is that those developing this MUST get the tech support folks involved. Oklahoma didn't get the helpdesk people involved in the planning/development stages of their initial rollout. That resulted in thousands of questions that could have been negated by user-friendly prompts and error messages.

    Off-campus connections: Don't even go there. It will be a huge waste of helpdesk resources and endless whining. No educational institution can hope to be a good dialup ISP, so don't try. Let those off-campus find a local provider. If you have a technology fee, off-campus users will EXPECT a free dialup. One more reason to get rid of the technology fee.
  • When I was part of the executive, the Engineering Students' Society at my university brought in a similar program called the EUEF (Engineering Undergraduate Equipment Fund.) $25(CDN) a semester for every undergraduate engineering student. It's worked pretty well. Take a look at http://www.ess.ualberta.ca/services/euef.php.
    They've got a list of everywhere the money has gone since it was brought in. You might get some ideas there.
  • You can put the money in on-line education.

    What do you need (all of the following elements have to be fullfilled):

    -Support from teaching staff: they must want it.
    -Software to run this (you can buy it, create it yourself or use open source software).
    -You need support for the software
    -You need advice about creating on-line courses (You could just put the syllabus on-line, but then you're not creating on-line courses).
    -You need someone who will keep the courses up to date.
    -You need someone who will answer questions relating to the on-line courses.

    The combination of all te preceding elements are quite costly if you are serious about it.

    But then again you could simplify stuff a lot and just offer a combination of a forum / a file sharing environment/ e-mail listing.

  • Tech Fees. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by saintlupus ( 227599 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @03:13PM (#2910248)
    I work for a university, and we have a special 'technology' fee that is charged to students, intended to be used for focus on new technology of direct benefit to students either in the classroom or related educational/learning activities.

    I work for one too. We also charge a technology fee. It goes straight into the general fund, never to be seen by the IT department.

    This seems pretty common -- most of the colleges I've heard of use the tech fee as something to raise rather than tuition. There's lot of those; Death of a Thousand Cuts to keep the paper tuition low.

    --saint

  • Educate the educators (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kooshvt ( 86122 )
    While I don't agree with colleting fees from students when you have no clear goals in mind with the money, I do have one suggestion. The school I attend has a very good infrastructure and lots of software at the proffesors disposal to allow students to access grades, assignments, homework, or whatever online (such as the blackboard software). However this software seems to be rarely used due to the fact that some professors simply have no idea how to use it. Professors from nontechnical departments such as the English department simply just don't get it because they have never been properly shown how to use it. The software was probably purchased using technology fees from previous years but it is now worthless because no one uses it to it's fullest potential if they use it at all.

    What is the point of constantly spending money to buy software and hardware that no one will know how to use. Take some time and set up seminars on how to better use the existing infrastructure. Educate the proffesors on how to make the best use of the technology at their disposal.

    I am all for spending money to upgrade and expand the technology used on campus, but make sure people know how to use it and will use it before adding more unused resources.

  • i know... (Score:2, Funny)

    by fringd ( 120235 )

    spend the money upgrading all the machines to the latest version of windows! i think xp only costs $500 per license, but you could probably still exaust all your funds by paying microsoft.

    my friends are really right. microsoft just "get's the job done." i mean really, if we were installing linux, we'd still have truckloads of money unspent. waste is the silent killer...

  • Don't overlook active participation in an existing, well-conceived project. I've mentioned my Historical Event Markup and Linking Project [heml.org] here on /. before. Our system's generation of SVG maps [heml.mta.ca] and timelines [heml.mta.ca] is wonderfully internationalized [heml.mta.ca] in order to apply to as many disciplines as possible; my partners and I hope it will get widely used at this early stage so that peer criticism will direct its adolescence.

    Strong projects using existing technology will exploit the network's ability to deliver to, and collect from, anywhere. For instance, your older faculty in archaeology, Classics, Religious Studies, etc. probably have thousands of excellent slides under their own copyright that they really hope will not disappear after they retire. A local, web-based catalogue of these would be a treasure-trove to new faculty and might even be a selling point in the increasingly competitive market for academics.

  • As John Holt said, learning is not the product of teaching -- it is the product of the activity of the learner. So what do you want your students to do? The best uses of technology for students are as a tool performing these activites, ideally using the capabilities of technology to support networked collaboration. What are these activities? In biology they include performing observations (digital cameras), data acquisition (A2D boards), analyzing data (spreadsheets, graphing, pspp, etc), and presenting results (word processing, presentation tools, VNC to share screens and project results). There is also a specialized role for technology as a problem-solving environment (coupling a modelled environment with a set of built-in tools for analysis).

    As I've written before, the biggest danger is the indescriminate use of technology to just do what was done before but now with technology. Most of the extant course management tools (WebCT, Blackboard, etc) have this focus. For more innovative approaches, check out lon-capa (lon-capa.org) or learnloop (learnloop.org).
  • I went to OSU. Whenever this question was posed to the students, one of the biggest requests always involved mice in the labs. Most computer labs on campus used old mice and had no mouse pads. Every mouse was perpetually in need of cleaning. Before you go out and spend lots of money on anything innovative, make sure all the basic stuff works well... and if you can, get Optical Mice so no one ever has to clean another lab rat again.

    Other suggestions:
    Improve Documentation: One of the biggest questions at CS-OSU was, "How do I get an X session?"

    Improve network infrastructure: This can always be improved.

    Improve WebCT/remote learning: WebCT/Remote learning tools typically need improvement. Usually, the biggest problem is not the software but the Teachers who are unfamiliar with it but required to teach course through it. Student aids for these teachers are not always adequate.

    Wireless: This may be a bit much, but the students would love it if you could get it working.

    Subsidized/Discounted Software: At OSU we had the Buckeye Bundle. It included every MS product (any OS, any Office, Studio) for $100. We also had a Software to Go website where we could download some stuff like SSH for free. This was very popular with me and my friends.
  • The thing that angered me when I first got to my University was that every rich student's parents seem to buy them a brand new $2000 laptop (not to mention the latest, most wastingest, trendy SUV, but that's another rant) which they only ever used for music and porn, while I was barely able to run netscape on my ancient box and going half-blind from a fuzzy, dying monitor (Imagine getting a headache every time you tried to study- not very encouraging). Seeming to have the least capable machine in the dorms was embarrassing enough, but the fact that I'm doing CS made it even worse.

    I don't think any school should buy machines for every incoming student, but some sort of program tied into the financial aid office whereby us less-than-priviliged kids (and especially those of us who really need a decent machine, like computer scientists :) ) can get one. Also, public labs don't cut it, as I routinely need to be a sudoer or administrator, and I break my box all the time trying out bizarre things. Can't really do that in a public lab.

    Also my school built something called the Wildnet [colorado.edu]- which is also a nifty idea.
    • You were angry with them because thier parents were wealthy? That's a bit pointless, isn't it? After all, they made thier money, let them spend it as they see fit.
    • When PCs started really becoming common in everyone's house (umm..like 1994 or so), you could always tell who the hard-core techies were, because they had these ancient machines held together with duct tape and glue. Be proud of your ancient machine.
  • I currently work at a research university, and one of the foremosts issues we face is not in a number of useful tools and projects which promote research and education, but how to get these tools and systems to interoperate. It would be great if a student could log in with their student ID, and access any of the tools and services that might be available to them. These might be electronic reserves, their class registration, their course's website, the campus bookstore (for ordering books), a central file storage area particular to that student, etc. I'm not aware of any university which has seemless integration of learning and research tools.
  • You have funding, but you can spend it wisely by trying out href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/manhattan/"& gt;Manhattan Virtual Classroom available for FREE at SourceForge. Makes it easy for prof's to post lectures, notes etc. by simply attaching docs, not coding them into html. Has very low hardware requirements an is extremely stable.
  • At Rock Valley College in Rockford Illinios they have something called EdNet. Simply put it's a graphical BBS that can be accessed via the web or through computers on campus. When you sign up for a class there you automatically receive an EdNet account. The system seems to work well for Rock Valley and the few other schools that I've heard use it. It doesn't necassarly have to be EdNet but this is kind of a system is interesting because the teachers can create there own "Room" for there classes. Within these rooms you can post comments or questions, get a chat going with another student, or just get your homework assignment. I'm not sure were one would go to get info about EdNet specifically but I'm sure a search in google will reveal something.

  • Weave's guide to spending Ed Tech monies (Score:3, Insightful)

    by weave ( 48069 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @04:17PM (#2910502) Journal
    When proposing how to spend Ed Tech monies, it's important to keep the institution's goals and best interests in mind. Education you may think? No, it's grand openings and tour opportunities.

    There is nothing more important than providing a platform for University and politicians to come together to pat each other on the back and show off. Therefore, all proposals must meet this primary objective. If it fills a room up, all the better.

    Therefore, Weave's the good and the bad list for spending ed tech money.

    THE BAD

    • Infrastructure: Forget bandwidth upgrades, replacing tired 10 Mbps hubs with switches, wireless, more disk for your SAN, and that fancy LTO tape robot you've had your eye on. (The robot may qualify if it is in a clear case where you can see it in operation. Something like an ADIC 100 is therefore just an ugly little black box and not worthy).
    • Tech Training: "We are a learning institution. We will not send our techs out for training. We will cross-train internally." Besides, you can't touch or see training. Only possible exception is if it produces nice certifications that can hang on the wall and become a small part of a larger tour.
    • End-user Training: See above. It doesn't matter if the equipment purchased is used to its fullest. Let the IT department answer any end-user questions on the new stuff.
    • Tech staffing: Big no no. It doesn't matter if hundreds of computers are added all over campus, or older equipment is under massive migration to the latest, the tech support department will need to absorb the added duties. (All they do is play quake all day anyway). Besides, we don't want to look like we're using the money to grow a bureaucracy. Work smarter, not harder.

    THE GOOD

    • Labs: Where x is the total amount of money available in ed tech money and y is the number of computers in a typical computer lab and z is the current price of a new PC, calculate n = x/y/z and purchase n computer labs. Infrastructure? Staffing? You didn't read "THE BAD" section, did you?
    • Multimedia lecture rooms: Smart boards, projectors, good. This is very likely to get approved. Board members can sit in a classroom and view a powerpoint presentation about how the money was spent. Make sure to annotate the presentation with notes scribbled on smart board and printed out so board members can take with them. Concerned about faculty training? See next bullet.
    • Faculty development lab: Throw a few computers, VCRs, presentation monitor, and a cabinet (glass) full of impressive software titles up, and take a tech from the help desk area to man this new lab. However, it's important to ensure faculty have no additional release time from normal classes to learn how to integrate technology into their courses. We wouldn't want to take them away from teaching students. Also, don't train that help desk guy. He's a computer geek, they just know this stuff naturally.
    • Get a cheesy portal product: Force all users to migrate off the UNIX or Microsoft mail servers they have been using for 10 years onto some new portal product like Campus Pipeline [campuspipeline.com]. Be sure the product, whatever it is, has two pricing options. One, some made up outrageous fee like $250,000 and the other, a free grant model where allowing them to put up advertising on your web pages and use cookies to track student browsing habits. You can then take credit for saving a quarter million dollars, despite it duplicating (or even losing) what functionality you already had.

    I hope this helps. p.s. This is just a theoretical exercise. My employer is, of course, far more enlightened on these matters...

  • If you can't figure out what to do with the money, then why are you collecting it?? I swear, you liberals are just nuts .. Let the students keep THEIR money, and spend it truly useful things, like tuition and books.

    -B
  • I found out about this neat new tech just recently. You take a tree, shread it to ribbons. Then mash it with some chemicals, and pull it out flat.

    Then take some berries or blood. Dip a pointy stick into it, and scratch out the same characters that come up onto your screen when you use a keyboard.

    The technology is amazing. It is 100% portable, and usable without batteries or electricity of any kind (although using at night does require an accessory light). In addition, they never, ever, ever become obsolete. If I understand correctly, there are no licenses, so when finished, you can hand the treepulp with blood scratchings to the next set of students.

    Now, it is somewhat fragile, and is flammable. But it survives being dropped off of a desk MUCH better than a laptop. Even better than those toughbooks.

    The user interface is pure simplicity. No keyboard or mouse. You simply take a stack of this treepulp, and place it in sequential order. Then physically move the 'pages' back and forth to get to the desired 'page'.

    And, here is the truly insane part: they are cheap. For the same $899 that you may spend on a computer that will be destroyed and obsolete in a few years, you can literally buy thousands of these treepulp stacks.

    The support costs are almost zero. You need a box or 'treepulp shelf' to store them on, and you need some climate control (not as rigorous as that needed for computers, BTW), but that is it. No network admin, no support contracts, no licensing agreements.

    I know it sounds like this must be vaporware, but I have actually seen them for sale in stores. Maybe it is just an east coast thing, but I have a feeling that these will really take off.
  • My school [ncsu.edu] offers a distance ed. program based on technology.

    You can check it out here. [ncsu.edu]

    Anyway, this is a big deal to me. I'm 28, a parent, and I'm married. It would be very hard on me and my family to go back to school now. With this program I'm able to get a comp sci master's degree without taking away from my income or family time (I do the work after my two year old goes to bed.)

    In addition to that, on campus students are able to make up classes or watch critical sections twice. The school makes money on VBEE (video based engineering education) students even though they are charged less because they don't use the same assets. They make even more money when they reuse the lectures. (A lecture is good for about 18 months in comp sci.)

    Anyway, on campus students benefit, the school benefits, and VBEE students benefit. It's not cheap. To do it right you need a camera man, you need to mic every student, you need streaming realplayer servers, you need good presentation monitors in the room, etc. Production quality matters. However, it's enabled me to get a masters (I'm almost done) and learn *a lot*. It's improved my career and my life.
    • Student help desk: basically kids can bring their computers in from home or from the dorms and have the techs take a look at it and fix whats wrong. They can call in and get help over the phone too. Open to undergrads/grad students (prolly staff too but I havent seen it advertised)
    • Keeping the computers up to date: P4s and high end P3s are in all the open computing labs, no P2-450s are left in the open/teaching labs.
    • 15" LCDs: this I think was a waste but thats what they did with the money, they prolly justified it by saying it was a good deal and they are saving money on power consumption (important here in the western US)
    • Rentable equipment: Laptops, digital cameras, digital camcorders, etc. CC needed for deposit for equipment, rental time is in 4 hour blocks, everything is due back at the end of the day.
  • It's much easier to suggest simple toys than to make deeply thought-out contributions to educational technology use. So here's my favorite toy :-) Whiteboards that make copies of their contents used to be large expensive things that rolled flexible surfaces through scanners and printed copies. Now there's a low-cost computer-integrated alternative - Mimio [mimio.com]. It's a ~$400-500 device that uses special pen holders and an ultrasonic position-detector bar that clamps on the side of your whiteboard, which tracks the position of the pens and transcribes it to a computer. You can do simple applications like copying the whiteboard, and they've got some extra software for OCR text recognition, streaming audio correlation, etc. It's useful for simple transcriptions, and also useful for multi-location meetings (admittedly, that's more of a business application than a school application.)

    I think there's also some competitor in the $300 range.

    • Mind you the software shipped with the device is Windows-only. However, there has been some effort made in understanding the Mimio protocol which can be found at the "GNU/Digiwb" site: http://digiwb.spline.de/ [spline.de]

      At one point in time I also developed a very rudimentary driver written in perl which is available here [fxweb.com]. Very rough around the edges, but it's a start.

  • I'm sure most of these have been mentioned at some point or another, but just in case:

    - One of my math professors puts all his lectures and notes on the web in PDF/JPEG format AND Quicktime videos.
    He uses Apple software for this (I'm sure there are alternatives) and it's an incredible help in the complex subjects he teaches: Algorithms, Graph Theory, Mathematical Logic, etc.
    I'm sure not all classes would benefit from the idea, but mathematical courses and some of the more complex computer science courses definitely would.

    - A "related papers" database linking research papers to each lecture in each course.
    Sure, any interested student can google their way to one of the public databases, and any teacher with the time can put the links in his website (if he has one).
    But having this process automated would make it easier for both students and teachers, and would allow other things: cumulative links independent from website changes, automatically sharing of links between professors, accepting submissions from students (at least graduate students), and maybe attached commentaries for each link ("a la Slashdot", without the Trolls).

    - Some of my professors use egroups to share information between the students. This is a ridiculously easy/cheap way to get the students to discuss assignments and topics outside the classroom and provide them with files, links, whatever might be of their interest without interrupting lectures.

    - Burn everything you can (lectures, videoconferencies, software, books, tutorials, etc) into CD-ROMs for the public library. Not everyone has access to a high-speed connection, or can spend all day in the university using the labs. This should be automated and independent of each professor.

    - Internet kiosks everywhere are always a good idea.

  • Don't go too fancy... (Score:3, Informative)

    by joto ( 134244 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @10:15PM (#2911562)
    Simply ask yourself the question: "what is the most used resources now?" That should give you the answer.

    However, I have some ideas as well...

    • More copy-machines needed everywhere. Staplers, binders, that sort of thing.
    • Computer rooms overloaded during peak hours. Need more computer rooms. Stuff them with old computers, people needing a fast one will do so outside peak hours anyway.
    • Most universities have more than enough bandwith, but if it is low, block common file-sharing programs as actual work should get priority.
    • Make sure competent people are running the machines, better invest something in salaries than in more machines (when half of them doesn't work, that can become expensive). Add quotas for everything, especially disk/printer usage, morons with large mp3-collections or morons that print every web-page they see should not be allowed to make life harder for other. Many students are competent. Pay them to run the network as part-time jobs. Install every imaginable kind of scientific open-source software. Get licenses for mathematica, matlab, spss, etc...
    • Have different labs for different users. Standarizing on just one platform (whether it is Windows, Unix, or Mac) is not going to make everybody happy.
    • Make a queue-system for making it easier to find an available machine, add a time-limit (not too short to get useful work done) if every machine is occupied.
    • Put up some web-kiosks around campus at various places. That should give easy access to information when you don't need anything more than a quick browse of assignments on the course homepage, or checking your email. Put a printer there as well, but preferably with very strict quotas to avoid too much maintenance (say: max 3 pages per login session).
    • Don't bother about students in dorms wanting access for free. They should either pay you the same they would have paid to a commercial provider, or shut up. If they can afford a computer, they can afford to pay for bandwith as well.
    • Make sure you invest in something that will benefit everyone, not those screaming loudest.

  • Another fee to students? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PhotoGuy ( 189467 ) on Sunday January 27, 2002 @10:18PM (#2911568) Homepage
    Man, that is so screwed up.

    Of all the additional things that educational institutions are dinging students for these days, I think imposing a "technology fee" is disgusting.

    Any fees for research should come from government, industry, and other organizations. The students should contribute to technology innvoation through their *work*, their *research*, their projects, and such. Not through a "fee".

    I know about inflation, but my University (which I gruaduated from in 10 years ago), is now charging *three* times what I paid for tuition. This is just wrong that higher education is becoming more and more exclusive. Things like this fee are just plain wrong, especially if they're having trouble finding what to do with it.

    Instead, they should encourage projects where interested students put their time and effort in, above and beyond, doing technologically interesting projects. People who are interested will do the world. Those who are ridden with apathy, won't be involved, and wont' care. No big loss.

    -me
  • One thing I've always for the longest time wanted to see was a digital library accessible from outside the library's physical building. The stuff I'd want online is documentaries magazine and journals newspapers and maybe even copies of the books themselves. I've seen stuff like this before (called Onlamp I think) but it is mostly just old periodicals and has a shitty search utility. The benefits of having texts of all forms online is it becomes much easier to include passages into papers and easier for professors or TAs to go over the work and see if the student's been copying directly out of the book. While this is indeed a ton of work it might be a doable project because somebody somewhere has already thought of this.

  • access access access (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Fianna ( 142312 )
    Top things I've seen done with these tech grants are:

    Laptop checkouts (IceBooks == sweet!)

    Connectivity (wireless is great, but a chicken in every pot, or rather a RJ-45 at every library table or booth is excellent)

    Multimedia (ahh, buzzword! I know, but having a dedicated lab with dual quicksilvers (733? can't remember), copius amounts of macromedia/adobe software and both weekly tutorials AND classes willing to use the stuff makes for happy students who are blending the ol' liberal arts with some more technical skills)

    Bandwidth is an important one, but doing it properly is key. As has been suggested, smart routing to keep the filesharing users from taking all the bandwidth, but without shutting them down, is key

    -jon

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