This past year, I’ve been serving on a task force at my institution. Our charge is to investigate the intersection of technology and learning on campus, make recommendations regarding where we might focus our energy in the next five years, and (perhaps most importantly) recommend political structures that might then provide guidance and insight on an ongoing basis.

This post at CunchGear struck a chord. The author’s recommendations for new college students are (simplifying):

1. Don’t buy a new laptop. Buy a used one.
2. Install free software on it.
3. If you want to play fancy games, use someone else’s fancy game machine.

Scott Merrill, the author, even addresses two major constituencies: engineering/computing-type students and liberal arts (literature, history, etc.) students:

• [ COMPUTING ]
  No matter what you buy, you’ll probably have better facilities on campus. And networks are everywhere: remote into powerful machines.
• [ LIBERAL ARTS ]
  You’re just typing papers and checking Facebook. You don’t need an expensive computer.

And do you know what? I think he’s right.

Sadly, institutions are slow to change. I would love to push for the following:

• Install a free operating system on all public machines.
• Offer a netbook/laptop programme that provides low-cost, robust laptops running open software. System76, for example, provides netbooks and laptops ready-to-go with Ubuntu. I’d love to have an EduBook to trial – my suspicion is that this little laptop would cut it for many students.
• Establish a grassroots initiative to provide training and support for students. On my campus, we’re starting a learning/living community initiative, and I could see that new community structure playing a role in this way.

I might be able to go further in my recommendations, but that’s what comes to mind at the moment.

This re-statement/reflection on Scott’s piece was inspired by a post over at TeleRead. Chris at TeleRead closes with the following statement:

Perhaps the emphasis on college students having the latest and greatest technology should be reconsidered, at least from the perspective of giving them them the best ability to focus on the important thing—their education.

Now, making a bit of a 180º turn from what I was just saying, I’ll claim that this is a naive, sweeping statement that fails to take into account any of the realities or pressures I think many faculty feel in higher ed: students expect new media. Their world is made up of interaction and video, and we’re still giving them chalkboards. So when the sweeping claim is made that they should focus “on their education” (at the same time as you’re calling for new modes of interaction, collaboration, and problem solving), please consider what tools we’re currently working with, where the technology is headed, and how we might be leveraging that technology to improve our students’ learning experience. No one I know is considering technology for technology’s sake… but we’re pretty sure that there’s some really amazing learning we could be supporting… if we could just get the tools in the students’ hands.

The fact is, some of these devices do enable real-time, community-driven collaboration (many-to-many interactions) that simply were not possible a few years ago. Yes, I could photocopy a student’s paper and hand it out to everyone… but doing that with 20, 3-page papers means 60 x 60 pages (roughly 3600 pages). Using tools like iAnnotate allow students to comment on and mark up each-other’s papers instantly and digitally. And, perhaps more importantly, tools like that allow me to handle my digital workflow more easily. (I do not, at this time, own an iPad, but I’m reasonably confident that a lightweight tool designed for media creation, annotation, and consumption would be a boon on a day-to-day basis. Netbooks simply don’t cut it (for many reasons), and my 13″ MacBook is too big and has too short a battery to be practical.)

In my mind, we’re in a Catch-22 situation in higher ed: we can require our students buy tools that let them engage in distributed, real-time media creation and collaboration surrounding digital artifacts… but that implies that our pedagogic approach is going to change to support their purchase of those tools. Down that road lies a commitment to change when many think that we’re doing fine as it is. Or, we could adapt our pedagogy (which is fine as it is), but our students won’t have the tools to engage the way we want them to. How do you drive change in a system that is (at best) mildly elastic, but ultimately static and resistant to change?

I’m teaching a first-year seminar this year titled Creativity and Leadership. I’ll put the question to them. Perhaps they’ll come up with something.