[74] in Resnet-Forum
Re: Why?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Leo D. Geoffrion)
Tue Nov 30 11:03:21 1993
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1993 10:34:44 -0500
To: resnet-forum@MIT.EDU
From: ldg@skidmore.EDU (Leo D. Geoffrion)
haynes@cats.ucsc.edu (Jim Haynes) writea:
>4. You want to foster an academic environment in which the students
>accept the computer simply another item for the personal tool kit, like
>the telephone, the pencil, and the dictionary.
>
>6. It's an experiment to see what will develop when students have
>computers in their living quarters.
>
>8. It's simply an idea whose time has come - ten years from now we won't
>even think about the reasons for residential networking because it's
>unthinkable not to have it. (Or will we wish we had waited a few years
>for wireless networking and not spent all that money on wire?)
>
>10. Students are coming from such computer-rich home environments that
>they will feel deprived if they can't have networked computers in
>their living quarters.
I'd phrase all this in a more ambitious framework. If our job is to
prepare the leaders for the next several decades, then we need to expose
our students to some of what the future world may look like. Distributed
access to information is clearly a key piece in what will characterize the
workplace of the 21st century.
Tools like gopher, Mosaic, WAIS, universal email, and other such goodies
are more than technological amusements but represent the starting place for
new work environments that will emerge over the 40+ year careers of our
current students.
I do not think that anyone can fully appreciate the leveraging that is
possible from such information tools if the contact point comes soley from
public user rooms where you have only a few hours per week of access.
There's no substitute for the personal desktop with 24-hour resource
access.
=============================================================
Leo D. Geoffrion, (518) 584-5000 Ext. 2919
Associate Director ldg@skidmore.edu
for Academic Computing, FAX: (518) 584-3023
Skidmore College,
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
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