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Generation Tech

As technology alters countless aspects of society, it is inevitably transforming the student experience. These days, few undergrads have known a world without the Internet—and some aspects of college, both social and academic, hardly resemble university life of years past. (Remember pay phones? Letters home? Waiting in line for course enrollment?) A student journalist explores […]

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As technology alters countless aspects of society, it is inevitably transforming the student experience. These days, few undergrads have known a world without the Internet—and some aspects of college, both social and academic, hardly resemble university life of years past. (Remember pay phones? Letters home? Waiting in line for course enrollment?) A student journalist explores Cornell in the age of the Internet, mobile computing, and social networking.

How is the student experience changing in the digital age?

By Adrienne Zable

When Bailey Hall was renovated in 2004, the architects asked psychology professor James Maas, PhD '66— whose popular Psych 101 course brings 1,300 students to the concert hall for thrice-weekly lectures—what kinds of technology he would like to see incorporated into the design. He suggested $75,000 worth of equipment, a proposal that he was certain would never make it through the budget process. The response was not what he expected. "They looked at me and laughed," Maas remembers with a grin. "They said, 'We're not talking about this year or next year, we're talking about the next quarter century.' And they came back with a list of equipment that was well in excess of a half million dollars."

Maas, who has taught on the Hill since 1964, remembers a time when staying ahead of the technology curve meant juggling slide carousels and canisters of 16mm film. For many of his current students, however, "slide" refers only to the individual units of a PowerPoint presentation. "Now," he says, "I can take a jump drive with all the slides, films, music, everything, in the palm of my hand." These days, thanks to technological innovations, Maas can teach students on the Qatar campus via distance learning, take attendance using wireless remote controls, and tap a dizzying variety of online resources to enrich his lectures in real time. Such innovations are emblematic of how academia is evolving as it tries to keep up with the fast-paced digital world. These days, few students have known life without the Internet—and some aspects of the college experience, both social and academic, hardly resemble university life of a few decades ago.

Semi-retired professor Brian Earle '67, MPS '71, who arrived on the Hill as a student in 1963, has seen the evolution from analog to digital firsthand. "When I started teaching, you read your notes and used the blackboard; occasionally you had an overhead projector with acetates that you could write on, or you could write on the glass and erase it," Earle recalls. "If you were really high-tech, you could have overheads made by media services on campus. That meant that a lot of faculty would have graphs or charts put together, and you would see the same overheads two or three years after the end of the graph line because professors didn't want to throw away those valuable overheads." In the communication classes Earle teaches now, he uses Power-Point slides to convey lecture notes so he can easily make last-minute changes to reflect the most up-to-date information. And thanks to the course management website Blackboard.com, he can disseminate class materials without killing trees.

New technology has not just changed the way lectures are presented, but also the way they are digested. Gone are the days of spiral notebooks, often made illegible by the haste with which notes were taken in lectures. In fact, students today can complete an entire semester while hardly ever putting pen to paper. Some, like Jessica Lopez '12, have essentially abandoned paper altogether. "I take my laptop to class and take notes on my computer," she says. "It's more organized than when I take notes by hand, and it also helps me keep up with the professor in lecture." Much of Lopez's academic work can be done digitally as well. If she misses a class, she can download lecture slides or daily readings from Blackboard.com. Nearly all of the communication major's assignments are typed in Microsoft Word and submitted via e-mail or Blackboard.com's digital dropbox, and she is more likely to ask a question in an e-mail to a professor than drop by during office hours. And while blue books are still used in some exams, many professors now prefer take-home tests, final papers, or projects that are completed digitally.

Most students rely heavily on technology in their academic lives, but there is no universal rule when it comes to how they use it. Lopez may prefer toting her laptop around campus, but Arts and Sciences senior Tony Manfred isn't ready to give up his notebooks just yet. "Usually I take notes by hand," he says, "because it's easier for me to organize my ideas and get everything down." But Manfred is no Luddite—the self-confessed BlackBerry addict checks his smartphone constantly, using it to text with friends about social plans as well as to correspond with professors and classmates about coursework. "At this point it's almost impulsive," says the English and American studies double major. "Sometimes I get backlogged and have to go on e-mail binges."

Professors, too, are putting in plenty of screen time. Many classrooms are outfitted with advanced audiovisual equipment, allowing faculty to plug in laptops and project lecture materials; daily classroom preparation can include assembling a PowerPoint slideshow or updating the course website to reflect syllabus changes. These tools allow faculty to include clips from YouTube in their lectures to illustrate a point, or to immediately evaluate whether or not the class has understood a concept through a quick survey via hand-held remotes called iClickers.

The increasing dependence on technology has its downsides. As academia goes digital, more and more material is created and stored online—and technical snafus can mean big problems. A Blackboard.com server crash during study week last fall caused a panic among students who feared that they would not be able to access important material in time for finals, and a three-day e-mail outage in 2008 derailed communications for many students, faculty, and staff. The University has several fail-safes to guard against such crashes, but that doesn't mean that the campus Internet works 100 percent of the time. "There are a lot of backups," says CIT senior technical consultant Mark Anbinder '89. "There are connections from campus to Syracuse, to Geneva, to Rochester, to New York City. So if our main connection goes down there will still be some flow of traffic." Campus e-mail is backed up on two servers, one in Rhodes Hall and one in the computing center, so if one dies or a connection fails the other will take over. "The odds are overwhelmingly against everything failing at once," says Anbinder. "But every once in a while that's going to happen."

Another challenge that CIT must address is the cost of upkeep. New technology is constantly emerging, rendering old systems obsolete (remember floppy disks?). But software and hardware upgrades are frequent and expensive, and many departments lack the funds to keep up with the fast rate of change. "At CIT, we have to keep replacing our own equipment and upgrading our own software, but we also have to push other departments to do so," says Anbinder. "If we're supporting old technologies, it gets more expensive for us to have three different versions of operating systems that we have to test everything with and train our staff to handle."

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