Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Opinion
Waste Paper: Communications and the Decline of Print
10/4/2007
Who still prints and mails newsletters? Judging from the ones I still get, most are produced either by well funded organizations that can afford to publish and mail print without an expectation of direct revenue or very local organizations, such as a gardening club, which might still have a substantial constituency of people who don't spend much time on line.
Reducing Print on Campus
Now, our students by and large spend a lot of time online, on average about 16 hours a week. But how much time do they spend reading? And what kind of reading do they do? One thing is sure: We don't expect them, or our faculty and staff either, to spend much time reading print that we mail them. Do a Google search on "paperless" and "university," and you'll see that while we all doubt that we can get rid of paper, we're certainly trying hard to do so.
When an institution is successful in reducing large amounts of print, it seems that the motivation is primarily economic. For example, at Sacramento State University, it is estimated that just e-mailing students to go online and check their registration via the Web, instead of mailing them printed reminders, saves the university $70,000 a year. Christopher Dawson, writing at ZDNet, is quite emphatic about the cost of printing things on paper:
Of all of the Education IT purchases you could possibly make, purchasing just one more printer is the least cost-effective of them all!I really love one of his throw-away bits of advice, which parallels precisely what I have intended to end this week's column with anyway. He implies it's time to go and do the equivalent of dumpster-diving: Spend an hour or two on your campus looking into the content of the paper recycling baskets that are all over the place. (Or ask your campus recycling people to look for you and gather some statistics.) It's almost certain that an analysis of what you find in there will give your some ideas about where your institution is spending money printing stuff that needn't be.
Don't believe me? The average business-class laser printer costs in the neighborhood of $2,000 (including extended warranty over its lifetime). Over the life of the device, it will produce at least 2,000,000 simplex pages. If you can buy paper, toner, and consumable printer parts in volume, you will pay close to $40,000 to produce that printed output over the lifetime of that single $2,000 printer!
If you, instead, spend $2,000 on a server, you could provide your students and faculty with instant access to over 50,000,000 pages worth of information for every 100GB of hard drive space on your server!
I've been spending time reading blogs on my handhelds, first a Treo 650 and now an iPhone. If you haven't yet, give it a try. Waiting in line, riding a bus--not so much on subways, which dive underground and cut off signals--it's more than possible to do it; it's actually easy to enjoy doing it. And, so long as you mute the sound or wear headphones, you'll be far less annoying than a "wide stance" newspaper reader.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
Cite this Site
copy text (above) for proper citation
Recommended Reading
- Sun, Stanford Working To Archive History
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today.
- The Quilt Coalition Rolls Out XO Communications for High-Capacity Network Services
The Quilt, a coalition of 28 regional network organizations, has added XO Communications Services to its authorized vendor list. The Quilt represents 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions across the United States. With this new relationship, Quilt members can purchase XO's high-speed IP transit and network transport services at competitive rates.
- Wimba Classroom 5.2 Expands Classroom Capture Support, Adds MP3 Downloads
At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company's Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features.
- Automation Chimera: Education Is Not Management
The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what's good for management is not always good for learning.
- Cognos Releases BI Software for Linux-based IBM System z Mainframe
Cognos, which IBM acquired in January, has released an update to its business intelligence software that will run on the Linux operating system on IBM System z mainframes. IBM Cognos 8 BI was being developed by the two companies prior to the acquisition, but assimilation of Cognos into IBM accelerated development.
- Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche
Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
