Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Focus
Telecommunications: The Next Legacy?
8/22/2005
As universities discover the benefits of wireless, telephone systems just might become yesterday’s news.
EXTINCTION IS A WELL-DOCUMENTED phenomenon occurring frequently on this planet; everything from the dinosaurs to the dodo bird have seen the end of the line. In the world of technology, extinction is both frequent and forced. Whether it’s the mainframe computer or floppy disks, many former staples of college computing are now relegated to museums and the personal collections of technology historians.
As both cellular telephones and VoIP (voice over the Internet protocol) become more affordable, traditional telephone systems just might be next to join the dusty shelves of history. And nowhere is the impending end of the traditional telephone line felt more acutely than in academia. For years, colleges and universities have offered Centrex-driven, hard-line telephone jacks in campus dormitories and have earned big bucks selling long-distance services to students who use them. Now, however, as more and more students are turning to cell phones for their communication needs, some schools are reconsidering their telephone policies altogether.
At Wake Forest University (NC), technologists recently launched a pilot program to determine how best to phase out traditional land lines and move students to a mandatory wireless plan. “I never thought I’d see the day when telephones became legacy systems, but for us, it might not be that far off,” says Jay Dominick, assistant VP for Information Systems. “Keeping telephone systems just d'esn’t make sense for us anymore, so in a sense, we’re simply adjusting to reality.”
Communication Breakdown
As Dominick implies, the writing certainly is on the wall. In September 2004, he and his colleagues received a number of loud complaints from faculty members about the inability to get in touch with their students. After a brief investigation, Dominick’s team discovered that faculty members were calling students on dorm phones, and leaving voicemail messages that were never retrieved. In January 2005, Dominick’s crew set out to crunch some numbers about voicemail usage, or the lack thereof, on the campus telephone network. The results were staggering. Of 1,985 mailboxes: 14.9 percent hadn’t been accessed in 30 to 50 days. 10.8 percent hadn’t been accessed in 51 to 100 days. 7.5 percent hadn’t been accessed in 101 to 200 days. 24.9 percent had never been accessed at all. Remarkably, more than 58 percent of campus voicemail hadn’t been accessed at all in the 30 days prior to the study. With campus voicemail as the university’s primary method of communicating emergency information, Dominick knew he had to respond to this alarming trend quickly.
However, instead of fighting the student movement away from telephones, he embraced it. Recognizing that students were eschewing their dorm phones for cellular ones, Dominick lined up three cellphone companies, Cingular (www.cingular.com), Verizon (
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.
