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A New Kind of Academic Freedom
4/21/2004
Such a device can locate the carrier – such as a student or faculty carrying a PDA or cell phone. At Carnegie Mellon, that means that software can enable students to selectively let others know their location, find out where friends are, locate a meeting or lecture, and so forth. Bartel gives examples of using such software to schedule lunch or a study group with others based on their proximity, or quickly plan a meeting based on where the members are at a given moment.Wireless Voice Technologies
An initiative at Dartmouth that has gotten lots of attention is the college’s
move to voice over IP (VoIP) technology for telephone calls. The campus already
had made long distance calls from campus free, finding that was cheaper than administering
a complex billing system. Now, Levine says, "all new buildings have voice
over IP for phones" instead of traditional phones.
Among other things, voice over IP technology makes any computing device a phone—a
notebook computer or PDA, notably. A wireless laptop running a small software
application needs only a headset to become a wireless Internet telephone—usable
anywhere that he laptop can connect to the network. The move to VoIP opens new
possibilities, Levine points out, since voice, video and data can now converge,
allowing the user to mix voice with video and data, share party line conversations
on the fly, and much more. "It really is a phone," he says. "You
can call a campus extension or an outside line."
With campuses ready to experiment further with mobile devices and wireless networks, and vendors eager to work with them to test out new products, mobile computing is ripe for growth. Campuses like Dartmouth, the University of Minnesota, and Carnegie Mellon represent the cutting edge, but others won’t be far behind.
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Linda Briggs is a freelance writer based in San Diego, Calif. She can be reached at lbriggs@lindabriggs.com.
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