How IT Provisions a Student’s Home Away from Home

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How IT Provisions a Student’s Home Away from Home

5/17/2005

By Terry Calhoun

BASED ON PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE OUR COLUMNIST ARGUES STUDENTS NEED ‘LOTS AND LOTS OF VERY FAST BANDWIDTH’

When this week’s column is posted to the Internet, I will be in Manhattan, celebrating my oldest daughter’s graduation, with lots of honors, from a metropolitan-area college. We moved her in eight days before 9/11 and her exit from New York City has also been marred by violence, as she now lives about 200 feet from where those poorly-made ‘grenades’ exploded in front of the British Consulate last week. (And she arrived home from a late-night study session that morning within 30 minutes of the explosions.)

I spend a lot of time scanning the higher education environment on various issues and one has been the move from dormitory to residence hall-–driven by student expectations. During Ruthy’s matriculation at college my family personally experienced the demands and needs of students and the sometimes ineffective response by the college administration. So, whenever we can give students what they want without a huge expense, we should give it to them – and that includes unlimited bandwidth!

This week’s column is actually driven by some recent discussions on the EDUCAUSE CIO Constituent Group about bandwidth: How you control it and whether or not colleges and universities should accommodate even the greatest expectations of their students.

I come down on the side of, “Yes, by all means accommodate their expectations.”

In the residence hall world, many colleges and dormitories currently fail miserably at student expectations. Many of today’s students come from households where they had parking at the front door, have always had their own bedroom, and often even their own bathroom. How well each new crop of freshmen adapts to what our institutions have to give them, shows the resilience of young people.

One way of putting the issue is to accept that we cannot realistically expect students to think of the campus-–including their living spaces–-as having only academic functionality. That would be ludicrous. Students eat, sleep, party, romance, play, exercise, and basically live out all of the parts of a modern young person’s life. And a lot of this is on campus.

It’s not a bad thing to accept this, but if you have some misgivings, then perhaps a focus on a growing trend in pedagogy that posits that “learning”-–including learning of academic things-–g'es on for students 24x7, no matter what they are doing.

And there is very little as important to learning (and, yes, to play and those other things) than bandwidth: Lots and lots of very fast bandwidth. Why should we not provide unlimited 24x7 bandwidth? I can’t think of a single reason besides these two: (a) it’s a little more work for IT staff and (b) it costs a little more money.

Well, maybe it’s time-–as one poster on the CIO group said (paraphrased here as I was unable to reach him to get permission to quote him in full):

Maybe we should be more and more looking at networks like other folks on campus look at things like other student amenities, such as intramural athletic fields, the new residence halls that are quite luxurious that are springing up in many places, the one-stop shopping for student services, and so forth.