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Campuses Getting Greener: IT has a Role to Play

8/17/2005

By Terry Calhoun

It’s pretty typical for IT to play important roles, both in discovering environmental problems and in finding solutions for them.

Then we look at the “social equity” part of that Triple Bottom Line.

Even on the Web, Women and Men May be from Different Planets. In a medium founded on information technology, new research is aimed at detecting inequality in the uses of that technology. At the University of Glamorgan, a recent study has shown distinct and divergent ways in which men and women both design and use websites.

Looking at factors such as visuals, language, and navigation, of websites created by students, researchers found that compared on 23 different factors, men and women showed differences in their designs. For example: “Where visuals are concerned, males favour the use of straight lines (as opposed to rounded forms), few colours in the typeface and background, and formal typography. As for language, they favour the use of formal or expert language with few abbreviations and are more likely to promote themselves and their abilities heavily.”

They then showed a selection of university websites were shown to men and women users, and the same preference for design that was displayed by designers was matched by users: women overwhelmingly favored websites produced by members of their own sex, ditto for men.

So then, the researchers looked at the home pages for 32 higher education institution websites and found that 94 percent of the sites displayed a masculine orientation, with only 2 percent favoring a typically female bias. The implications for social performance and equity are clearly there.

Finding the Way at Utah State University At Utah State University, researchers are working at creating a convergence of several technologies into a single device for the visually impaired. None of the technologies is great on its own for an individual’s use, but merging the capabilities of a wireless network, a pedometer, a Global Positioning System, and a digital compass” looks to do a much better job.

Computing in the Cotswolds: Gloscat delivers IT on wheels Finally, the Gloucester College of Art and Technology (UK) has a mission to improve ICT and Internet skills across its rural county. In today’s society (economy, environment, whatever) people need to be connected, or to at least learn the skills they can put to use when they are connected. (That’s inevitable, right?) Thus the Gloscat Commun-IT van, "a mobile computing centre taking e-learning and computer access to some of the remotest areas” which travels the rural areas in the county offering nearly the same amount of courses as at the campus, and also serving specific learning sessions to very local needs.

At this point I might jump onto my hobbyhorse about how much waste is created in the manufacture of our equipment, and the dire need to have better systems of recycling. But we are all pretty aware of that, I think, the problem is how to deal with it.

If you don’t think of this as a problem, then ask yourself, when you throw something away: “Where is ‘away’?” When I was in the Navy (1967-71, including three Vietnam tours) Navy ships just had a 55-gallon drum welded to the back of the ship, and wh'ever was on trash duty would just dump everything into that drum, which led to a chute, which put everything right down into the ocean – I mean everything!

I sure hope they’re not still doing that. In 2005 there is no “away.” Whatever you send out of manufacturer’s drain pipes or drop into the waste containers is going “somewhere” but we’re increasingly aware that it’s not really going away. And IT advancements are leading the way into that increased awareness, too!

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.

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