[26977] in resnet
Re: Pay for printing in labs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Malsed)
Fri Oct 28 11:41:27 2011
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Message-ID: <LISTSERV%201110281138255383.31CC@LISTSERV.ND.EDU>
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:38:25 -0400
Reply-To: Resnet Forum <RESNET-L@listserv.nd.edu>
From: Mike Malsed <mike.malsed@CLAREMONTMCKENNA.EDU>
To: RESNET-L@listserv.nd.edu
We use PCounter to track and monitor student printing. We run reports,
publish them monthly based on the information I get from PCounter, and I use
it to deal with student abuse of the privilege as well.
As many know, I am a huge proponent of the privilege of free (as in beer)
printing – it’s a privilege and students have this drummed into them many
times a day, almost. But it’s still free, and unlimited (within simple
guidelines). There are many reasons for this, a few of which I will
elucidate here:
One that I'm moving toward more and more, philosophically, is that of a
conflict of interest. I can feel many eyebrows rising at this . . . yes, I
feel it's a conflict of interest. Look at the jobs that are printed – at my
campus it’s over 95% that can be directly or indirectly attributed to
academic activities: PDFs of readings assigned by faculty; assignments;
research information; etc. Your mileage may vary, but I would bet dollars to
donuts that it’s pretty close at your house as well.
So we have a situation where students are required to print, to one extent
or other (I’ll touch on this in a second). They are required to print out
their assignments; readings still aren’t good on a reader – often they’re
poorly scanned and they’re definitely not OCR’d, and you can’t conveniently
and easily mark them up; and it’s still far more convenient to print out
research materials, hole-punch and stick them in a binder.
The college requires them to pay to be here. We’re requiring them to print –
which makes them pay yet more. The more they have to print, the more they
have to pay; and we, as a college, are telling them they have to do it. The
more printing, the bigger the revenue source – and that’s almost exactly the
phrase that I heard when it was proposed the last time. That, to me, is a
conflict of interest.
But what about a quota? Yes, I know that the vast majority of students will
print less than 500 pages per semester. What about that 15% that print more?
Why not charge them? I looked at that – rather than just charge them, I went
about it empirically.
Turns out that there were two situations here:
First, Seniors doing Thesis – again, required. And most of our Thesis
readers require students to print out drafts, submit for MINOR changes, then
reprint. Many of our students reprint just those pages (smart – I definitely
encourage smart!) but often that does not work as the edit changes
pagination. Do I penalize students that are required to do the thing that
gets them penalized?
Second, faculty assigned readers. This semester we have one faculty who has
over 800 pages of a reader that he requires students print out to bring to
class. When approached, he uses the old argument that this is what he needs
and he has academic freedom to do what he needs to do. More and more faculty
are placing large amounts of readings behind locked doors like Sakai, WebCT,
Moodle or whatever. eReaders, iPads, and the like are nice, but still don’t
cut it for this purpose. Again, we’d be penalizing students that are being
required to do the thing that gets them penalized.
Lastly (in this little essay, which you are likely tired of reading) comes
the “Who” of penalizing. I work at a college that has two definite
classification of students – those that come in BMW’s, Mercedes, Lexus
(Lexii?), etc. and those that either don’t bring a car or bring an old
Civic, Corolla, Neon, etc. Guess which group doesn’t care whether we charge
for printing or not? I’ve had a Zuckerberg here and I can tell you that she
didn’t care, for herself, if we charged for printing; those driving the old
Dodge Neons . . . yes, they definitely care.
There are other reasons, and I don’t feel they’re any less valid.
Environmentally, it’s more efficient to use my facilities; it’s a great
marketing tool; teaching internal responsibility as opposed to external;
etc. However, I think I’ve droned on long enough here. Search the LABMGR
archives (at LABMGR@listserv.uark.edu) for the “Print Allotment for
Students” thread and you’ll find a good conversation about this (Jim Rizzo
and I had some fun going back and forth).
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