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Imagination on the Move continued
7/12/2005
Strategizing Mobility
After pilot projects in mobile computing from 1995 to 1997, Seton Hall University rolled out a full-scale laptop program in 1998. The effort, known formally as the Mobile Computing Program, was a standard- fare laptop initiative: Starting that year, all freshmen were required to have a portable PC. The school purchased IBM (www.ibm.com) ThinkPad laptops and leased them to students at a discount. To counterbalance the expense for students at need, Seton Hall officials increased the pool of financial aid and gave priority to those who qualified. By 2001, every student on campus went through the program and bought a new laptop. Coupled with the school’s growing wireless network, the laptops facilitated computing from just about anywhere on the school’s South Orange campus. On the surface, everything was great.
Behind the scenes, however, CIO Stephen Landry says that technology officials knew they had to take additional steps to ensure that students used the laptops as part of their everyday experiences. The first approach to this strategic enforcement of mobile computing was what Landry calls “curricular integration,” an effort to support and encourage faculty to integrate the use of laptops in the curriculum. At the center of this endeavor is the Teaching, Learning, and Technology (TLT) Center, a multi-disciplinary facility that financially motivates educators to build entire lessons around laptops: The center doles out a total of $250,000 in multi-year grants to academic departments willing to redesign core courses around mobile technology. Paul Fisher, the center’s director, says the grants are some of the most sought-after dollars on campus today.
| GREAT IDEA |
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At Georgetown, a database was designed to store content freely, and utilize XML to deliver it on demand in real time, to just about any kind of device, in virtually any form or format a user requested. For Georgetown, the missing mobile computing piece was making sure that content was as mobile as the technology itself. |
“The whole idea was to inspire our faculty and department heads to use mobile technology to improve student learning,” says Fisher, who notes that the center also rewards Faculty Innovation Grants of up to $5,000, for individual educators who embrace mobility. “We wanted to make sure we weren’t just handing out an expensive word processor.”
Faculty-centered incentives weren’t Seton Hall’s only approach to solidifying mobile computing on campus: Landry and his colleagues launched an internal marketing effort aimed at students, too. For starters, through a special laptop group within the IT department, the university set up a number of support services such as maintenance and repair. Next, the school mandated that all freshmen take a skills class called “University Life” in their first semester on campus. While this class g'es over basics such as studying effectively and saying no to drugs, it also includes several hours of tutorials on how to use the ThinkPads, how to connect to the wireless network, and how to keep anti-virus software up-to-date. Though most students term the class “cheesy,” Landry says it works wonders, nearly eliminating help desk requests from first-time users.
