I had a group of first year students over for a hosted dinner tonight, and actually brought this subject up to them, as well as the upperclassman advisors. Every one of them felt the labs were valuable (or would be, for the first years), in that there are many software packages that are licensed to the university, but cost prohibitive for the students (matlab, etc). They felt the labs in the residential colleges, plus a few others around our Rice campus, were a very valuable resource, used by most of the students at some point, and appreciated.
-----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Julian Y Koh Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2013 4:07 PM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] [Off-Topic] Computer Labs On Aug 21, 2013, at 15:56 , "Eric T. Barnett" <ebarn...@astate.edu> wrote: > > I was wondering just how useful computer labs are now/will be in the next two years or so. Getting rid of most or all of those labs would cut down on costs considerably. I've heard of some colleges dumping computer labs as they seem to be needed less and less as users have more and more tech available cheaply. What's your take? We definitely have fewer computer labs on campus than we used to. Even for some applications that traditionally required high horsepower computers run fine on today's laptops. Generally labs now are not run by central IT so much as by individual schools and departments that have specialized needs. Sometimes the need for a lab is driven not by specialized hardware needs but by software licensing restrictions. -- Julian Y. Koh Acting Associate Director, Telecommunications and Network Services Northwestern University Information Technology (NUIT) 2001 Sheridan Road #G-166 Evanston, IL 60208 847-467-5780 NUIT Web Site: <http://www.it.northwestern.edu/> PGP Public Key:<http://bt.ittns.northwestern.edu/julian/pgppubkey.html> ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. !DSPAM:911,52152bf0187601041714445! ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
