Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Opinion
Commencement 2004
6/4/2004
Springtime in Academe. This is the time when commencement speakers across
the land regale, bore, entertain, and attempt to challenge the Class of 2004.
This year’s commencement speakers will echo the themes articulated by
the ghosts of commencement speakers past: this era will be the best of times,
the most challenging of times. No question these will be interesting times.
(FYI: contrary to conventional wisdom, a quick Google search suggests that this
is not an ancient Chinese greeting/curse.)
For the graduates who began their college careers in the late 1990s, the world
they “enter” with their new college degrees is very different from
the one they knew as college freshmen. They (and we) live in a world and an
economy that is post Y2K, post-dot.com, post-9-11, and (hopefully) emerging
from recession.
The good news for this year’s graduates is that the job market may be
improving. Early indicators suggest that employment opportunities should be
much better this year than in recent years. The welcome employment upturn notwithstanding,
job options for (and salaries of) new college graduates will be well below the
levels posted in the closing years of the Clinton/dot.com era.
On the technology front, computers have become
less inexpensive: over the past four-to-five years Moore’s law assures
that laptops and desktops continue to “do more for less.” Cell phones
have become ubiquitous; wireless networks and services—on and off-campus—are
becoming so.
Step back a bit and we see that the whole concept and connotation of wired has
shifted significantly in recent years. Recall, for example, the annual “Wired
Campus” report from (the now departed) Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine.
It was an unpopular (unpopular among campus officials!) effort to rank U.S.
colleges and universities on their technology services and resources. Today
the notion of “wired”—access to/using lots of technology—increasingly
points to “wireless” students who wander campus with their cell
phones, PDAs, and notebook computers.
Also on the IT front: over the past four years, through the rise and demise
of the dots, the Web continues to touch more of what we do and how we do it,
on and off campus. To paraphrase the 1972 observation of George Bonham, founding
director of Change magazine, technology and the Web today, like television in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, “dominates much of American life and manners.”
As in past years, some of this year’s grads will stay on, migrating from alma mater in the spring to grad school in the fall. Over the course of their undergraduate years they were touched—carefully, appropriately, magically, and metaphorically—by faculty (by some of us!) in the arts and sciences. We became their mentors, suggesting and then fostering an interest in a faculty career and life in academe.
The distance from baccalaureate graduation to graduate school is one of time, place, and space. It also represents a leap of faith.
Recommended Reading
- Beck Technology Donates DProfiler to Colleges, Universities
Beck Technology recently announced that it will donate its DProfiler software platform to colleges and universities for use in construction-related coursework.
- Microsoft Adds Gen 4 Datacenters for Cloud Computing
Microsoft is initiating the fourth in a series of datacenter upgrades to enable its cloud computing services, according to a Microsoft blog post Tuesday. And, like everything else in the software world, being highly modular is a good thing.
- Can You Operate as a Virtual Being?
Now that we are conducting at least a part of our business of education virtually and often meeting in virtual environments, let's explore the really big question for academics in a Web 2.0 era...
- Columbia Center To Smooth Web Operations with Collaboration Suite
A college or university without a Web site is inconceivable today, but with every site comes the challenge of managing content. Some sort of automated system is a given, but how much should the site's content management system integrate with other aspects of the campus computing infrastructure?
- IBM's Pass It Along: Mapping Memes Toward A Learning Organization
How IBM's new release is following through on old challenges... big ones.
- North Idaho College To Provide Accessible Lecture Recordings for Disabled Students
North Idaho College will be implementing a new classroom capture system as part of an effort to provide accessible education to students with disabilities. The college will be using SpeakerBox from ClearSky Systems for the lecture capture program beginning in January 2009.
