TechTalks Transcript
Mobile Computing for Teaching and Learning at Wake Forest
May 16, 2002
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 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 David Brown [DB] |
 Jay Dominick [JD] |
JB: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk series for spring of 2002 and to this session on Mobile Computing for Teaching and Learning at Wake Forest University. You are here because it�s time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN cohost for today and our session is coming to you today with the support of our CREN member institutions. Be sure and join CREN if you haven�t as yet. Let me welcome Howard Strauss, our technology anchor, who is back all the way across many oceans from Tasmania and Australia. Welcome back, Howard, we�re glad you made it back in time for this session!
HS: Me too, Judith! Thank you. I�m Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts. In this webcast, I invite you to join Judith and me in a lively technical dialogue with our guest experts, David Brown and Jay Dominick of Wake Forest University, that will answer the questions you�d like answered about mobile computing for teaching and learning and ask those very important follow-up questions. You can join in this dialogue by sending your questions via e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this webcast. If we don�t get to your questions during the webcast, we�ll provide an answer in the webcast archive. On March 10, 1876, in Boston�Judith, you know what happened then?
JB: What was the date again, Howard? You did it! You did it! Boston Tea Party, I bet.
HS: March tenth, 1876, in Boston? Nope! What happened then is that Alexander Graham Bell successfully transmitted the first spoken sentence electronically
JB: Oh, I knew that!
HS: �using his new invention, the telephone. I know, it just slipped your mind there for a minute.
JB: Right!
HS: He had built the device to help his deaf students understand speech. Early in 1967, Douglas Engelbart�s laboratory became the second site on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network or ARPANet, the primary precursor to the Internet. ARPANet was built to allow government research labs, many of which were universities, to share data. The primary use of these inventions today is quite different than what their creators planned at their inception. Bell would never have imagined a cell phone user using Bell�s invention to call her husband from the airport to say her plane would be delayed! Nor would Bell have any idea of even what it meant to use the phone network to transmit data or even what a phone network was. Did the developers of the Internet imagine Napster, videoconferencing or the web? Unlikely! Since the phone has a 90 year head start on the Internet, it is useful to review some of the things that fundamentally changed its use. The same things are likely to also have a profound effect on the Internet. When there were just a few phones, it was a special-purpose device used on special occasions. You didn�t call up your mom or friend on a whim because chances are they didn�t have a phone! The ubiquity of phones and the reach of the phone network to all corners of the world changed that. When you can count on nearly everyone having a phone or an Internet connection, it becomes a commodity that gets used in hundreds of unexpected ways and hundreds of people work on new uses for it, adding value with every new use. But phones were only available at fixed locations. If you needed a phone when you were traveling, even to the store to pick up some milk, you had to find a pay phone. Pay phones soon covered the landscape as people expected to have a phone wherever they went. When our students expected Internet connectivity wherever they went, we put computer labs everywhere�in the library, the student center, classroom buildings and so forth. But the advent of cell phones which gave callers mobility is changing all that. Pay phones are disappearing for lack of use. Why use a pay phone when you always have a phone with you? People in trouble of any kind anywhere call for help on the phones they have with them. Will our computer labs similarly disappear? Well, with this new phone mobility, people are expecting to do more than just talk. The phone network, after all, is commonly used for data and even for accessing the Internet. Could one display web pages on a cell phone? Well, try it and you�ll soon realize that cell phones and the web were not made for each other�but that�s changing too as both the web and cell phones adapt to this new use. We don�t expect our students to do computing or even use the Internet from their cell phones, but what happens if we give every one of them a powerful mobile computer with Internet access? How might that change the way teaching and learning is done? Many schools have tried that. One of the first was Wake Forest, a liberal arts university. Today Jay and Dave, who have been on the front lines of this effort at Wake Forest will tell us how this worked for them and how it might be in the future of your university on today�s webcast of Tech Talk. Judith?
JB: Well, thank you, Howard, and your visions of how we�re using computing does call to mind the idea of asking just what is going to happen with teaching and learning if we can count on reaching students anywhere�in the mall or in the union or wherever. So with that, I�m looking forward to our discussion today and let�s welcome our first guest, David Brown, who is the Vice President and Dean of the International Center for Computer-Enhanced Learning at Wake Forest University. When David was Provost, he chaired the committee that brought ubiquitous laptop computing to the university and over the last two years, David�s consulted with more than 300 colleges and universities regarding their use of technology. So we�re just real fortunate to have you here, David, and do you want to tell us where you�re calling in from?
DB: It�s fun to be with you. I happen to be calling in from Notre Dame where I�ve been talking most of the day with faculty here about some of the implications of ubiquitous computing. It�s fun to be on this side of the Tech Talk. I have listened in to many of the previous Tech Talks and even sent in some questions and I hope people will be asking questions of us.
JB: Well, I hope so, too! I imagine we�ll get quite a few. Let me go ahead and welcome our second guest, also from Wake Forest, Jay Dominick. Jay is the CIO at Wake Forest and as CIO, he�s responsible for the strategy, planning and operations for Wake Forest University�s highly-regarded information technology efforts including the ongoing implementation and support of the ubiquitous laptop computing project that is now in its�let�s see, is it the sixth or seventh year, Jay? And welcome to Tech Talk.
JD: It depends on how you count it!
JB: Oh, all right!
JD: It�s our seventh year and as our students are leaving campus today, we�re getting ready for the eighth year.
JB: All right, well, that�s
HS: In dog years, I think that�s a hundred years, then, and in Internet time, it�s something else, right?
JD: About a million years!
JB: It feels like that, that�s right! So we�ve got lots of questions. In fact, we�ve already had questions coming in so I think we�re going to start talking about just what is mobile computing?
HS: Are we?
JB: I think so!
HS: I thought we were��
JB: Oh, [inaudible], is that what you were going to say?
HS: I thought we were going to start talking about the history of how this happened at Wake Forest, David, and why�d you do it?
DB: Well, I might comment that Wake Forest, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is a university that has 4,000 undergraduates and about 2,000 graduate students and we will talk mostly today about what�s happening in the undergraduate student body�although there are reflections in the professional school as well. We�re about 92% residential and that�s probably all I need to say about Wake Forest. We were in Sleepy Valley in about 1994 in terms of technology and made a decision that we wanted to be a community of scholars that was connected with each other and helping each other learn and as we looked around the nation and the world, we saw that we were being overtaken by campuses that had rich communication networks in the form of e-mail systems and other things that come from Internet connectivity. So a faculty committee recommended that all of our students be provided laptop computers, and I might let Jay talk about what our program looks like right now.
HS: Jay, could you do that?
JD: I would be happy to! One of the fundamental decisions that the committee made was that students would be provided with mobile computing as part of the tuition, which is one of the unique characteristics of our particular implementation. The other unique characteristic is that the computers would actually be on a life cycle of two years. So freshmen get computers on their first day of school here and they turn them in for new computers the first day of their junior year.
HS: Could you tell us what happens to them when they turn them in? I mean, they�re already two year old computers. Sounds like they�re probably in pretty good shape.
JD: They�re in good shape. We take them, we clean them up, we then provide them�sell them to the local K-12 system along with training and some other programs that involve our students doing sort of technology transfer things to teachers. So we provide the school system about 1,000 computers a year.
HS: I thought you had 4,000 undergrads.
JD: The seniors take theirs with them��
HS: Okay.
JD: �when they graduate. So we get about 1,000 a year back from the rising juniors and the graduating seniors take their computers with them and move off into the working world or the��
JB: You mentioned that you were planning for the eighth year already, Jay. Just quickly, what is the configuration perhaps of the laptop that you�re planning for next year?
JD: Sure, the laptop we have for the fall is a Pentium 3, a 1.13 gigaHertz Intel processor. We�ve got a 15 inch display on it. There�s a DVD/CD-RW on it.
JB: Wow!
HS: We�re all going to enroll!
JB: That�s right!
HS: And then we�re going to leave after the first week. Once we get our computers.
JD: We would track you down and we would get it back, believe me, Howard! Even in Tasmania, we�d find you.
JB: All right, they�ve got your number how, Howard!
JD: We�ve got 384 megabytes of RAM on there, a 30-gigabyte hard drive, floppy drive, Windows XP for next year. It�s a pretty comprehensive machine.
JB: It sounds great. Just out of curiosity, how much does it weigh, do you know?
JD: About six pounds more than anybody wants it to weigh!
JB: All right.
JD: About 7.2 pounds.
JB: Seven-point-two pounds, okay.
DB: That has not been a problem for us by and large, though. We have worried about making sure that the laptops are sufficiently light to be carried around but we rarely get a student complaint relative to that.
HS: You have a single configuration, right? A single configuration, single vendor, that�s it.
JD: That�s it.
HS: Okay, and every year, you go back and you look at how things have changed and you come up with a new configuration.
JD: That�s correct. And we had the one configuration for faculty, staff and students and our administrative staff as well. So we have probably 99% of the computers on campus are of the standard model. There are differences in the various disciplines but they�re very, very few.
JB: You didn�t mention wireless. Does it have a wireless capability in it too, then?
JD: Not built in. We have wireless available through PCMCIA cards that students rent from us and plug into their laptops.
JB: Okay.
HS: You mentioned faculty. Do faculty get the same machine? Is there a program for faculty as well as for students? Could you tell us just briefly about it?
JD: The program for faculty is the same as it is for students, as a matter of fact. The hardware is identical and the software is identical. And they have a two-year rotation as well.
HS: Wow!
DB: That also applies to staff.
HS: Staff get a new laptop every two years?
DB: Two to three years, depending on their machine.
HS: Ah, now you�re hedging here on that!
JB: And they are laptops rather than desktops, even for staff?
JD: That�s correct.
JB: Interesting!
HS: Do staff also have desktop machines? I mean, is this laptop in addition to a desktop machine that a staff member might have? Or faculty?
JD: No, there are probably fewer than 30 desktop machines on campus and those are mostly specially purposed devices, for instance, in facilities�we have some CAD stations. But the administrative�the President�s secretary has a laptop.
HS: And just to carry this one step further, these people who have these laptops as their office machines, are there bunches of them that have decided they need a bigger screen so they�re using docking stations and that kind of thing? Or are they saying, �This is all the computing I need, this laptop�?
JD: When it started, we had a lot of external monitors. We didn�t use docking stations because they obsolesce so quickly.
JB: Yeah.
JD: But we used external monitors and keyboards and mice. But as the display size on the laptops has approached 15 inches, most folks have elected not to have CRT�s on their desks with the computer. We have some larger LCD�s for those who need them but the majority of faculty have this single display which is the laptop display.
JB: So then, if everyone has these, what about your classrooms? When faculty go into their classrooms, do they just carry their laptops in and plug them into the LCD panels?
DB: That�s exactly what happens. Faculty carry in their own laptops. If students are displaying in the classroom, they also, of course, can plug into the system and we also have standardized configurations for production�for projection in all of our classrooms.
HS: David, we�ve covered undergrads and faculty and staff but what about grad students? You seemed, when you made your opening remarks, you hopped over them.
DB: Well, in the case of the medical school, the graduate management school, the divinity school, they are on a similar program with slightly different configurations associated with the computer. The law school is not yet on an identical program. And one of our major problems has been how to finance students in the arts and science doctoral programs. There we�ve come up with a variety of different solutions, but we have not accepted the idea of passing two year old computers down to those particular students. But in general, the plan that we have does apply to the entire campus.
HS: What does one of these machines cost Wake Forest?
JD: Cost is a very closely kept secret, of course, Howard! They�re under $2,250.
HS: Okay. So if we say they�re about $2,000 dollar�s we�re not lying by too much.
JD: You�re not off by too much.
HS: How did you pay for this? And any university that were to go out and add a $2,000 computer to a student and just give them to them every two years would have to find some way to pay for them. How did you do that?
DB: Back in 1995, a strategic planning committee that was chaired by the Provost came in with a recommendation for 37 different things to happen at the university which included changing the student-faculty ratio and changing the overhead recovery allocation and a bunch of other things. And one of the components was the computer plan, and we increased tuition by 15% for just freshman students the year that we implemented this 37-point plan. And roughly * of that increase went to pay for the plan. Another third went for all the other things, like changing the student-faculty ratio, and the final third went for financial aid to offset the demographic distribution impact of having a higher tuition. After we did all this, applications went up, our incoming test scores went up and we were very much worried that it would impact who wanted to come to us in a negative way and it was exactly the opposite.
JB: That�s really consistent, I think. Were there other surprises as you implemented this, David, in terms of what one expected to see with this?
DB: Well, one of the surprises was that we expected, since there�s a kind of more males fiddle around with computers at the high school age than women, we expected that this would cause our number of male students applying to us to increase significantly and maybe a drop-off in women, and exactly the opposite happened.
HS: How did computers attract female students?
DB: Well��
JB: Yeah, did you figure that out?
DB: That happened the first year and the second year and subsequent years, it�s leveled off and you can�t tell the change. We thought we might get more science majors. That didn�t happen either. In fact, the disciplinary and gender impacts that we had projected simply didn�t develop.
JB: That�s interesting! We have a question that came in and before we get too far afield from the environment, I think it might be good to bring it in. It�s a question from Richard Baziel from Chicago State University. He�s asking regarding security for the network so Jay, this might be more your ball of wax here. He�s asking �How do you provide security for the network? Do you use a VPN or something similar?� Their university is struggling with how to do this and are concerned about anyone being able to tap into the network, wreaking havoc on systems, so how do you address this issue?
DB: Jay, I�m delighted you�re answering this question! I was asked this earlier today and I said, �I don�t know the answer.��
JB: But you�ll find out soon, right?
DB: That�s right.
JB: There you go, okay.
JD: All of our administrative systems are in a private network that sits behind a firewall. And we have virtually all of our administrative users, those who need to access those systems, behind that network as well so it is physically protected by a Cisco PIX firewall.
JB: Is this true with students, then?
JD: No, the students
JB: Oh, okay.
JD: �are on and the faculty are on what we consider to be the public network and it is only protected lightly from the ravages of the Internet in general.
JB: Ah, okay.
JD: And vice versa, I would mention! So that what we�ve decided to do is take a rather open approach on the academic side. We don�t restrict what goes on there much. We do restrict the peer-to-peer file sharing technologies like Morpheus and Napster but we don�t firewall the faculty and the students away from the Internet in general. It�s actually been a very satisfactory approach for us so far.
HS: Good! David, you said that there�s lots and lots of other universities who�ve done something similar to Wake Forest. But are there some differences in the way they�ve done this thing? Especially, are there differences in the way they pay for this thing? I can�t believe that there�s a lot of folks that just went out and raised their tuition 15%.
DB: The predominant model of most universities�we buy our computers and make them available to students and then they take possession of them upon graduation. Very few universities do this. Most universities that provide computers to students actually lease computers from the vendor and then give them to students. But they new development that is especially popular in public universities that are moving to ubiquitous programs is to identify a vendor or maybe two vendors and one machine or maybe two machines that are the designated preference for students to buy and then negotiating good deals with the vendor or vendors and essentially saying to students, �If you enroll here, one of the conditions is that you will have bought one of these computers. And if you haven�t bought one of these one or two preferred computers, you will have bought one that has the same characteristics as these computers.� For example, it�s got to be able to reach the Internet by either Netscape or Internet Explorer and have such-and-such a capacity. By doing that, it means that the faculty has assurance that students have equitable access to this learning tool and faculty are not therefore�they are no longer reluctant to give assignments that involve the Internet and if that is the case, they don�t have to dumb down their curriculum.
HS: What�s happened to computer labs at Wake Forest and other schools where now everybody has a laptop? Are the number of machines in computer labs dropping?
JD: Well, it plummeted!
HS: Well, that�s good!
JD: [inaudible] changed.
HS: Have to recover costs somewhere.
JD: Well, what we did was we provided a small number of labs. We probably went from 200 lab machines to under 50 now. And the lab machines are specialty computers dedicated to a single purpose. For instance, in art, we have a visualization lab and in music, we have a lab that is hooked up to MIDI instruments and things like that. So they�re really special function labs which require software or hardware that we couldn�t replicate on the ThinkPad.
DB: We�ve gained a tremendous amount of space on campus as a consequence of this, in addition to freeing ourself from the some of the costs of maintaining those desktops and labs.
JD: We have one public use lab of about 20 computers.
JD: You said that you�re not all wireless and that wireless is not a required kind of thing. Does that mean that you�ve put network connections all over the place so that people can take their laptops? I mean, if you�re talking about ubiquitous computing, one would think they ought to be able to connect anywhere.
JD: We took the tack when we first started this of wiring every conceivable location on campus and we�ve got about 30,000 live network connections for our 5,000 users. And so wireless sits on top of that in locations where the wiring wasn�t possible, like outside or in the spaces in the library which weren�t conducive to being installed with wiring and power. Cafeterias and places like that.
HS: Why haven�t you gone wireless? There�s a number of universities that have said they�re going to make the whole university a wireless connectivity area. Why haven�t you done that?
JD: We have thought about it. We�ve been using wireless technologies for about five years now. But there are really two main factors, the first of which is a rapidly evolving set of standards so that much like�to extend your telephone analogy�if you remember back in �86 through �95, every year��
HS: That�s before I was born!
JD: Every year there was a new modem standard, so as soon as you went out and invested in your 9600 baud modem, it was replaced within a year or so because the standards evolved so fast. That�s one area that we find ourselves. But otherwise, the other interesting thing that happened in the past two years is that instead of trying to give our students unlimited bandwidth, we�ve been looking to give them managed and controlled bandwidth. Napster and Morpheus and Kazaa were really cataclysmic events for campus IT professionals over the past two years and really changed my viewpoint on how we provide bandwidth to our users. Wireless networks, because they�re shared, are particularly susceptible to being abused by people using those sorts of technologies.
JB: We did have a question that came in quite early�in fact, yesterday sometime, Jay, regarding the wireless standard. It comes from Shyam Nair at Temple Law School and he wants to know, given all that rapid change in that area, have you standardized on any particular wireless protocol such as the 802.11 whatever.
HS: B.
JB: Well, which one is it? Have you standardized on one?
JD: There�s a whole alphabet of standards on wireless. We implemented 802.11, the two-megabit version, three years ago and now we�re waiting to see whether 802.11 B or 802.11 A winds up being the final standard, the final commercially accepted standard, shall we say. They�re both standards.
JB: So if somebody were to have to make a decision today to really deploy something��
JD: If you had to deploy something today, you would choose B. But if you could afford to wait for a year, you might want to look at A.
JB: All right.
HS: And are the things really incompatible? I mean, if somebody goes out and buys a card that�s B, it�s not going to work with A. You�ll throw the card out.
JD: At this point, that�s the case, though people talk about multi-mode radios. But I don�t know of any products that are on the market yet.
HS: Okay, we have another question from Tom Head at Virginia Tech and his specific question is, �Do students bring their computers to class at Wake Forest?� But I�d like to expand on this question and just talk about where do people bring these laptops? Where do they take them?
DB: First of all, let me say hi to Tom and thanks for the question. Students do not by and large bring their laptops to class and that�s because the best thing to happen in class is what can happen face to face. The educational value of the computer is staying connected with classmates and with the professor and with databases between class. Now, the computer is important in class for the presenter or for people who need to access electronic databases during class, but spending the time to get access to a database during class is usually not the best way to spend time in class. Yes, it needs to be done once or twice to sort of lead students to an understanding of how to connect with the database but not much after that. So the students use the computer primarily to stay in touch, to collaborate, to connect with databases, to do those things that a member of the academic community naturally does. They don�t use them in class. Maybe 15 of our 400 faculty members actually have students using the computer in class each day. Now, this would except those classes that are teaching something about the computer like in computer science.
HS: If I wandered off and grabbed some student at random on Wake Forest�s campus and looked in their book bag, would their computer be back there? I mean, say they�re going to the student center and they�re going from here to there or whatever, even if they don�t take it out in class, do they keep it with them because they want this kind of connectivity with the rest of their students?
JD: Typically they do not carry it on campus. As Dave said, we�re about 92% residential and we are so small that it is quite frequently the case that students will walk back to the resident halls between breaks in classes and they go back and do their e-mail and various things like that in their residence hall.
DB: Now if you saw the student, Howard, in a study group at night, the student would usually have the computer with him or her and in a study group, maybe you might have a study group of five students and maybe two or three would be checking things out on the Internet or maybe the class notes from earlier in the day or something like that.
JD: And in the libraries. It�s very heavy usage in the libraries.
HS: Okay, we have a question from Carol Langston who appears to be at a K through 12 institution, though it�s not identified in her e-mail. But she says, �We�re a K through 12 school and we want to initiate wireless on a small scale. First, we�d like to begin with mobile laptop carts with 20 laptops. I�ve searched everywhere for the carts and I�ve found that they have a maximum of 16 laptops. Do you have any suggestions?� But instead of worrying about her 16 to 20 question, could you just talk about the issue of laptops? It sounds like she�s setting up an impromptu lab in a classroom. Do you do anything like that?
JD: We don�t do anything like that. Students generally bring their laptops when required and set up their own impromptu labs. However, we do have several projects with K-12 and that sort of model fits quite well in there. One of our more successful projects, in fact, was to use some wireless equipment at K-12 to get to the portable trailers that students are quartered in often. In that case, a wireless connection to a laptop in a classroom is a very simple implementation to bring a computer in a classroom that otherwise wouldn�t have it.
JB: So it�s really a way of getting your networking done on your K-12 campus, quote-unquote, right?
JD: And wireless solutions for K-12 are very attractive in that they don�t really require much in the way of infrastructure. And that gives the instructors, the teachers and the local school officials, a lot more flexibility about how they use technology.
DB: I was recently on the University of Delaware campus and did run into one of these wireless cart configurations that had more than 16 computers in it. I don�t have the contact information now, but if the question asker will e-mail me, I think I can get that information to her.
JB: All right, well, that�s actually a good opening for me to remind people that now is a good time to send in more questions. And Carol, if you�d like to resend just a follow-up note on that, we can send that to David.
HS: Okay, we do have a couple more questions. One�s from�I�m trying to find his last name�Robert somebody here.
JB: Vineyard.
HS: Robert Vineyard. Okay, Robert Vineyard at Georgia Tech, do I have that right, Judith?
JB: Um-hum.
HS: I think so! And he says, �I was curious as to what security measures you have in place to prevent unauthorized access to computing resources.� Want to talk about what happens out there with all this ubiquitous computing, what extra things you have to do with security?
JB: Well, we kind of talked about that a little bit already but what I�d like to do is jump in and say we�ve got actually two questions, comments along this line, both from Georgia Tech and both talking about a wireless authentication software called LAWN, Local Area Network�what is it?
HS: Wireless Network. Local Authenticated Wireless Network.
JB: There we go! So bottom line is, do you have something to add to what you�ve said before, Jay, on this?
JD: No, we use�in the 802.11 protocol we use, we use the typical ESS ID security which is pretty minimal. One of the benefits of having the older style technology is that most of the hacking efforts going on today relate to the 802.11B [inaudible].
JB: There you go!
JD: You can�t just go to Best Buy and buy an older style two-meg 802.11 card and hack networks. For us, the wireless network�because it�s non-mission-critical�has not been a big issue for us security-wise.
DB: There is a big issue on security which is not only the possibility of violating copyright but it�s also the possibility of allowing critics of the university to look in on what�s actually happening in the relationship between a student and a faculty member and I think that we in the academic community need to be very concerned about possible erosions to academic freedom if we don�t make substantial provisions to make sure that the kinds of activities that are going on in the classroom have some kind of security protection so that some overenthusiastic potential donor or a governing board member doesn�t start objecting to what�s happening in the classroom.
JB: Well, you know, that�s a good point and actually the bottom line on a couple of those two messages from Georgia Tech is that they do have their LAWN code is, in fact, going to be open source. So we�ll put a link to those folks on the website and if folks are interested, they can then pursue that.
JD: Right, and I would just add a final comment that security in wireless environment is one of the major concerns that a lot of IT professionals have and good open source solutions to that particular problem, I think, will make wireless networking even more common in higher ed.
HS: Okay, David and Jay, could you talk about what kind of effects you�ve seen now that you�ve had five years, six years experience with this thing. What�s changed at Wake Forest since you�ve done this?
DB: Well, the really basic thing that has changed is the mental attitude that students and faculty bring to intellectual activity and to socialization and community building. It�s like the difference of moving from a public telephone to a personal phone, to go back to your�and indeed, even a cell phone, moving from a class that meets Monday-Wednesday-Friday to a class that meets almost continuously or from going to the library for a book to having the library available to you in your own student apartment. It�s just plain a difference in attitude toward life, the fact that you�re going to have this personally-configured, very powerful learning integration indexing tool available to you and as a consequence of that, you are much more likely to stay in touch with people for longer periods of time and to make comments on things that happen in the classroom and maybe even after the semester continue to share insights with the people who were in the class. There�s just much more community, much more communication and a much more self-confident attitude about using Internet resources for the purpose of intellectual activity.
HS: But is there more learning or better learning? I mean, the purpose�one of the purposes of college or university is to communicate information to students. Is this being done more effectively? Besides students just being happier to be there.
JB: Or maybe you can comment perhaps on is the kind of learning that�s occurring any different than you think from what was had before?
DB: I don�t think we�re going to know the answer to that ever and we certainly don�t know it yet. We do know that studies such as the Cue and Hue [?] studies that look at 18,000 students nationwide have determined that those campuses that are the most wired, the hundred most wired campuses vs. all other campuses, on those hundred most wired campuses�not all of them ubiquitous�on the hundred most wired campuses, the feedback is faster, there�s more contact between students and faculty by the rating of students. When we look at the Chickering-Gamson seven factors, there�s a significant and positive association with a heavy presence of computers and the pursuit of these particular variables.
JD: I�d just like to toss one other thing out there and Dave, get your comment on this, too. One sort of structural change that we�ve had since we began this program is that there are now two new departments on campuses. We now have an independent Computer Science program and we have an Information Systems minor in our business school. Two events, I think, which would not have occurred absent this sort of technology plan.
HS: But I guess I was more concerned about a course like Sociology or something that students were doing anyway. How has that improved or changed? I know that students are talking to each other more but are there things that are happening that amount to better scholarship?
JD: Let me give you one example, since you picked sociology. Prior to the laptop program, one of the most dreaded parts of the sociology discipline was getting through the quantitative classes because they involved logging into esoteric Unix systems and for poor liberal arts students trying to figure out how to use VI to submit [inaudible] jobs
HS: Oh, God!
JD: �[inaudible] SPSS and so the mechanics of that particular endeavor wound up being debilitating to a lot of students. But now SPSS is on everybody�s machine. It�s on my machine, it�s on every student machine, so the process of doing quantitative analysis in the social sciences is much easier and more standardized. We had four statistical packages prior to 1995 and now there�s just one.
HS: So you�re getting a lot of benefit out of this standardization.
JD: I think so!
DB: The assignments that are given in sociology are much more often now team assignments rather than individual assignments. A student might be asked to answer a question associated with the reading and instead of sending that answer, turning it in to the professor, they will send it to another student who will negotiate with the first student on the correctness of the answer that the two of them are going to turn in to the professor. Just little things like that make a big difference. And then there�s the big aspect in a field like sociology of students studying abroad. Fifty-two percent of our students get degree credits abroad before they graduate. They stay in touch with their sociology professors even while abroad. Indeed, if you�re on one of our campuses abroad, you�re on the same network as if you were on campus and so those students are staying connected. It�s also the case when students are out on internship assignments out in the community�and of course, sociology is one of our departments that would advance that kind of assignment�they can again stay in touch with people back on campus when they�re out on the assignment and then they can stay in touch with the mentors out in the social service agencies where they may have interned.
HS: Okay, we have a question from Scott R. Smith at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Scott says, �Will Jay and Dave please comment on the university�s strategic plan for PDA�s and handhelds?��
JB: Glad you came back to that! We need to talk about mobile and very mobile computing here.
DB: Chapel Hill is, incidentally, one of the largest public research universities in the country that has moved to ubiquitous computing for undergraduates, but I�ll let Jay handle the issue of the PDA�s.
JD: We are in the initial stages of trying to figure out where and when and if PDA�s fit into the model. Clearly the laptop computers that we have are wonderfully robust machines that do everything we ask of them. PDA�s are not at that point now. They are attractive from a price perspective, it would seem, but it�s not clear at all that they are in any way a substitute for the laptops. We have done a couple of studies this year, as a matter of fact, to see if they are complementary. They do seem to have a much higher mobility than do the laptops and because of their small size and the fact that they turn on instantly, they do have some applicability in the classroom. I think they�re still a little bit immature at this point to be part of the strategic direction. Our strategic direction, as Dave said, is really to integrate technology into the life of the university rather than implement a particular technology into the life of the university.
JB: Do you have any data, given that your students are obviously really comfortable with technology, have they gone the route of having both the laptop and the PDA to any significant degree?
JD: They typically do not carry PDA�s on their own. Interestingly, we had a project with 50 PDA�s in a physics class this year and we found that probably 20% of those students�students that we gave PDA�s to!�wouldn�t carry them around. We offered them to some of our student employees, our technology employees at the university. We had 15 of them have PDA�s all year long�and these are very sophisticated, technology-savvy students�and we gave them the opportunity of taking them with them when they left as sort of a thank-you. And we had only about seven of them take us up on that.
HS: They could take them with them as they left for free?
JD: For free!
HS: I�ve never seen anybody not take something for free!
JD: Exactly.
JB: There�s a mystery to be researched, right?
JD: What we found in our studies is it�s a completely bimodal distribution. Students either love them or they really find no use for them.
HS: Okay, we�ve got lots of questions coming in now! Something�s happened here. People have finally gotten their laptops to boot up or something, I don�t know. We have a question actually from Notre Dame for you, David. Are you still there?
DB: I�m still here. Looking at the dome.
HS: So you can go back and talk to Ted Manier. Ted says, �This question�s for David Brown.� He says, �In your talk here at Notre Dame earlier this afternoon, you mentioned that a high percentage of your classrooms are set up for wired or wireless network connections for every student in the class. And just now you said that very few of your students bring their computers to a class. This makes it sound as if it was a wasted expense to provide network connections for every student seat in most of your classrooms.��
DB: Well, what I said earlier this afternoon is that about 60% of our classrooms are wired to the seat, hard wired, and in about 20%of our classrooms, we have a wireless capacity, so we don�t have nearly as high a capacity in wireless as we have in wired. And I think all of us on campus would say that we overspent on getting wired access to each individual student seat and the conclusion that we probably shouldn�t have spent as much money there is a valid one from our experience. We need wired to the seat classrooms in every academic building, but not every one of those classrooms needs to be wired to the seat. Now, in contrast, every one of the classrooms has to have Internet connectivity at the podium and projection. That�s not what we�re talking about. We�re talking about wired to the seat.
JD: I would agree with Dave�s comment there.
HS: Okay, we have another question from Tom Head and Tom says, �Have you published any results of evaluations of the impact of ubiquitous computing?� Have you? Is there anything out there that has been published?
DB: We�ve published in several places. Our most recent survey, our exit survey of senior students, asked them, �To what degree did the use of technology in class add to your experience and mastery of course material?� This is use in class, not to what extent did the computer contribute to your learning, but it�s in class. Seniors, 33% said a great deal, 53% said somewhat, 3% said unsure and 7% said very little. That�s a pretty high percentage for in-class impact if you take the somewhat and a great deal. It�s 86%. There are a number of other studies that we�ve done and if one goes to my web page, you can link to a number of those students.
JB: Okay, I think we�ve got that up on the website somewhere. I�m sorry, Howard!
HS: That�s okay. We have a number of questions from Tommy Regan who�s Directory of Information and Learning Systems at Virginia Tech and he said something kind of interesting in the beginning. He says, �We�re going to require laptops for our engineering freshmen in the fall and have a couple questions.� So this is, I would say, pretty timely for Virginia Tech! He says, his first question�some of these you can answer very quickly. He says, �Did you have a computer requirement for desktops before the laptops?��
DB: No.
JD: No.
HS: So you just went right into this? This went from zero to laptops.
DB: Right.
JD: Not only that, we were a Macintosh campus at the time.
HS: And these laptops�you never told�I guess you did tell us what they were.
JB: Yeah, he said they were Pentium, I picked that up.
JD: They�re all IBM. JB/�
HS: Okay.
HS: Question. Are you tied to IBM or do you just reevaluate this every year?
JD: We did a ten year contract with them.
HS: Okay, so for ten years, that will be the answer. Okay, the second question was, �If students don�t use the laptop for classes, do you have complaints about the cost of laptop vs. desktop?� I mean, are students saying, �Why don�t we just get desktops and keep the tuition lower?��
DB: We did have those complaints until we coached our admissions counselors and our literature to make people aware in advance that the educational value of the computers is primarily what happens between class, during breaks between holidays and even between semesters and when students are studying abroad. And once we did that, those complaints essentially disappeared. The most important thing is to make sure that the network is always up and that the e-mail system is robust and then one doesn�t get complaints.
JD: And the other thing is when you move to a student computing initiative, you take on more responsibility for making sure that the student�s computer is functional and so we had to completely change the way we delivered service to students. And the difference between a desktop and a laptop computer is that, quite frankly, you can get your students to bring the laptop to you to fix it whereas before we were either dispatching technicians or we were asking them to carry their desktops to us, their Macintoshes, and that was a very difficult proposition.
HS: So you actually think your cost of support has gone down because you have a standardized mobile machine?
JD: We are certain of it.
JB: You have data on that, Jay? That you could share.
JD: Our annual IS budget has remained flat for the past three years and we�ve moved from supporting about 700 to 1,000 users to about 5,000.
JB: Okay, well, that�s pretty good.
HS: A lot of that was the mobility, but it sounds like a lot of that was also the fact that it was a standardized kind of thing. You always saw the same thing, you didn�t see something new every time you looked at a computer.
JD: We have a thousand cases of the same problem.
JB: Okay, good.
HS: Okay, another question that Tommy has is, �Are professors adverse to using computers in class?� You�re saying a lot of them don�t do that. Is it just that the classes don�t lend themselves to it or is there some reluctance on the part of professors to use them?
DB: I don�t think it�s adversity. I think that professors now say, �Well, what�s the best forum in which to give a monologue lecture?� And they may give that as a cyber show over the Internet so that they can have discussion in class. They�re always asking, �How can I best use the most scarce time I have?� Which is class time. And usually, it�s not to spend a whole lot of time using the computer. Now, most of our faculty will sometime during the semester use the computer for showing some particularized set of portraits or a film or something like that or perhaps demonstrating to students how to use the computer when out of class. And I don�t think there�s a general reluctance to use it.
JD: It varies by discipline how much it gets used in the classroom, too.
JB: Okay, we�re coming close on the time and I want to make certain that we get another question in from someone that is asking about, let me see, it�s �Greetings from Penn State Capitol College.� His name is Robert Brinkley and he wants to know about your software acquisition policy. It�s obvious that everything is set with you as far as hardware. What about the software component?
JD: Well, we license virtually everything centrally. If three departments can agree on a standard for a piece of software��
HS: [inaudible] question, if three departments can agree, [inaudible]?
JD: Exactly. There�s a natural�there�s a yin and yang here.
JB: Sounds almost biblical there.
JD: Then we will site license software so we SPSS as a standard, we have Maple as a standard, we have a standard compiler, Borland C++.
HS: Who pays for that?
JD: Central IT.
HS: Okay, so you get site licenses for these things and departments don�t pay for them. If the department says, �I want Maple,� the department doesn�t pay for it, you do?
JD: If the three departments can agree that Maple is their standard for symbolic math, we will license that for them. We did that for Acrobat this year. The faculty committee decided that we needed Acrobat on these machines and so we went out and licensed Adobe Acrobat and some other titles and they�ll be on all the machines next year.
HS: You site licensed those things? Or do you buy a hundred licenses or how do you do that?
JD: It depends, but with Acrobat, for instance, we bought the number of licenses for the number of machines that we purchased. So this year we buy almost 3,000 machines so we bought 3,000 licenses of Acrobat.
HS: Oh!
JB: Okay.
HS: So that all 3,000 people�when you say Acrobat, you�re talking about the Acrobat software that allows you to author in Acrobat.
JD: The authoring software.
HS: Yeah. That�s great.
JB: That�s wonderful. We haven�t talked yet about�well, we talked a little bit about your strategic plans and all, but in terms of just what is ubiquitous computing and what is mobile computing, we have some definitions, David, that we put out on the website to start our conversation today and then Howard led us in all different directions. But at any rate, coming back��
HS: Doesn�t everybody read books from the back to the front?
JB: There you go! So you�ve had seven years of ubiquitous computing which is where everyone has access to computing and the network. How is your campus different? And then I wanted to have you both kind of extrapolate out, what do you see is going to be different in the next five years as it truly gets totally integrated as far as mobile computing is concerned?
DB: Well, let me take this from a macro point of view and I think Jay may want to relate more specifically. And I�ll be brief. I think our campus is different because I think more people are more in touch with each other. There�s much more collaborative learning. There are closer student-faculty relationships. I think in the future that everything is going to be more student centered. It�s going to be more British in the sense that there are going to be �houses� of students that are going to be more significant than disciplines of faculty in defining what is done and I believe that we�re going to see courses that are customized to each student built of�and faculty member, built from chunks of material.
JB: Hmm, interesting!
JD: And I would say that the major difference from sort of the IT perspective is that there are really no more fights about technology on campus anymore. It�s just not even an issue really. The basic infrastructure to do pretty much whatever you want to do is there. It used to be that we would have contentions between the �have� departments and the �have-not� departments and those are gone. Everybody is equally advantaged.
JB: That�s a good point! It�s a wonderful�kind of a wonderful place to be. Howard, what final question or so do you have of our experts?
HS: Okay, I have lots of final questions. We�ll just keep doing this. You just keep asking me for another final question!
JB: I know! We could go for a long time here.
HS: Okay, one of the things I think people are interested in hearing is if a university is out there thinking about doing this, what kind of advice would you give them? Jay? David?
DB: One of the things I would advise them to do is to go to my website and second is to read a book that I�ve got coming out on ubiquitous computing. And there are some 35 lessons posted there that are the collective advice of 15 institutions that have done this. I don�t have time to go over those, but I would urge that that�s a quick source to look at some of those lessons.
HS: But if they wanted an executive summary of all that stuff, I mean, how��
DB: Okay, figure��
HS: Where would they get started?
DB: Figure that deciding that everybody�s going to have the same computer is ten percent of the challenge and recognize that there are going to have to be network decisions, support decisions, training decisions, etc. Another is don�t try to do this all at once. Come up with a five year financial and computer strategic plan. A third is use project management to implement this program because it is so pervasive throughout the institution that it touches absolutely every protected interest on a campus and you�ve got to be very careful that you�re massaging each of those interests. Make sure that there�s a faculty committee that is helping you make the hard decisions so that you can blame some of those hard decisions on the committee��
JB: That�s very good management advice!
DB: Those would be some of the things.
HS: Okay. My final-final question is where do you see yourselves going now? You�ve had this great success, this is working very well. Where do you see this going? Jay?\�
JD: I think we�re in a bit of a sort of reflection phase right now. We will come up in a couple years at the ten year point where we�ll have to decide what we want to do and I think right now, we�re sort of watching. We�re looking to see how some of these new technologies evolve. See if the very mobile computing part of this space that Dr. Brown described really does mature. And I think it�ll be another year or so before we are ready to make a decision about what the next ten years look like.
DB: I think we need to remember that we are in the business of building academic community, not being at the forefront of technology, but in order to build academic community and sustain it, we�re going to have to be at the forefront of the technology. But we have to remember it�s not technology itself, it�s for the sake of intellectual exchange, growth, development and community.
JB: Okay, Howard, there was one more question that came in that we haven�t taken that I really want to hear their answer to we got from the person at�Gary Kornbluth from Oberlin College. Should we go overtime and do this one?
HS: Sure, let�s go overtime, why not?
JB: Right, since it�s May! Gary is a professor of history and I mention that because I think it�s somewhat important relevant to his question. He asks, �Do your professors assign electronic versions of textbooks and other books knowing that students can read them readily on their laptops?��
JD: Actually, we have a project that we�ll start this fall in health and exercise science to do the class with electronic textbooks.
JB: Okay.
JD: That market is still evolving, quite frankly, and we�ve done studies in the past with various publishers on them and we�ve learned a lot about them. It�s not clear exactly how the electronic textbook measures up against the paper textbook but we do have a study that will start that analysis in the fall.
DB: The bottom line of the studies that we�ve done earlier is that students seem to learn about as well with the electronic textbooks but they hate them.
JB: Oh, okay. So access is not an issue then as far as the ability to carry it easily on your laptop as opposed to carrying a five pound book.
JD: That�s correct. And I think the electronic textbook topic is an extraordinarily interesting one��
HS: I think we could do a whole Tech Talk on it.
JD: Sign me up!
HS: Well, we did a couple years ago, right? Or a year and a half ago.
JD: But currently there�s not enough value, I don�t think, in just the electronic version of a paper textbook. But we will see in the next few years changes in the way electronic text is delivered that will make it of value.
DB: It�s interesting that the electronic journal article, I believe, will come into fashion much more quickly than the electronic textbook because the journal article needs those cross-references, those authentications that one tends not to make as frequently or as rigorously in a textbook.
JB: Um-hum. Okay. It is time for us to do our closing comments but we usually ask our experts if there�s any other final comment or question that they�d like to make.
HS: There�s lots of them and I think it�s a really interesting topic. And so were all the topics that we touched on today incidentally. But I think it�s already after 5:00 here. People are probably trying to get home here so I think we ought to just wrap this up, Judith.
JB: Wrap it up, all right. There we go. With that, let me thank all of our participants and all the folks who sent in so many questions for being with us here today. You may send follow-up questions to expert@cren.net and some of those questions will get answered. Thanks so much for being with us here today and be sure to join us again in the fall. Many thanks to our Tech Talk experts, David Brown, Jay Dominick; to technology anchor Howard Strauss; and to Terry Calhoun, our Tech Talk web guru; to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit; to Susie Berneis who is our audio file transcriber; and finally, a thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it�s time.
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