As I mentioned yesterday, I’m at this something of a mystery conference and listening to a guy talking about a laptop campus program at Cal State San Bernardino. It’s potentially pretty interesting to me because while CSU-SB is a lot smaller than EMU, the profile of what the school is like is pretty similar to EMU. I think this is a guy I should talk to at some point. One of the points he just made: the main complaint that various powers-that-be on his campus (e.g., faculty senate, tech committees, provosts, etc.) was concern about that one poor student who just can’t afford a laptop no matter what. So the solution they came up with was they collected old but still decent laptops from other institutional resources. So far, they’ve loaned out one.
Another fun-fact: 70% of the students at CSU-SB are on financial aid. At the same time, some huge percentage of students had computers, over 70% had high speed internet access where they lived, and over half of the students already owned a laptop before they were required to buy one. Again, given that CSU-SB has a similar profile of students at EMU, I bet that a survey would be about the same.
But a couple of other things I came across via my feed that kind of connect to the conference and that’s just kind of interesting:
- “Analysis: How multimedia can improve teaching,” from eNews (which features an annoying registration feature), which is about this Cisco study available via pdf here. I’ve only browsed through it; it looks very science-y and statistics and stuff, and kind of potentially interesting and useful.
- “Margaret Spellings, Where Are You?” from Inside Higher Ed. It’s basically an article about all sorts of different assessment tools going on around the country with all kinds of different universities. I know we’ve got a couple of different initiatives about assessment at EMU, and what I find reassuring about the article is that the efforts of higher ed on this already might end up fending off federally mandated standards.