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Wired! Technology reaches every corner of campus By Sarah Briggs The minute she wakes up in her Wesley dorm room, Jane switches on her computer to start her day. After checking out the current news headlines on the Internet, she sends a quick e-mail note to her faculty research mentor, asking if they can meet later in the day to go over her recent lab results. She also reviews several new messages from her project team in her accounting class—she’ll have to come back to the attachments they have sent containing additions to the business plan they’re working on for the class. Then she checks out the online syllabus for her Early British Literature course to make sure she’s on track with the week’s reading assignments, and she examines the eighthcentury artifacts pictured on the professor’s Web site for today’s class discussion on Beowulf. Later in the day, in her Maps and Geographic Information Systems course, Jane’s professor uses online satellite maps of sea surface temperatures to help the class understand how thermal changes in oceans affect weather and climate. In the evening, she’ll sign on to her computer again to review the off-campus study programs she might want to consider for next year and to find out the balance remaining on her college bill.
Yahoo’s ‘Most Wired’ Colleges in the U.S. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 15. 20. 25. 33. 34. 35. 40. 48. 49. 50.
Williams College (Mass.) Colgate University (N.Y.) Bates College (Maine) Occidental College (Calif.) Oberlin College (Ohio) Sweet Briar College (Va.) ALBION COLLEGE Illinois Wesleyan University Smith College (Mass.) Trinity College (Conn.) Wellesley College (Mass.) Swarthmore College (Pa.) Colby College (Maine) Bowdoin College (Maine) Pomona College (Calif.) Wabash College (Ind.) Carleton College (Minn.) Colorado College College of Wooster (Ohio) Earlham College (Ind.) Grinnell College (Iowa)
Source: Yahoo! Internet Life magazine.
All part of a typical day for an Albion College student, Jane’s activities suggest the integral role technology plays in our students’ lives, both in the classroom and out. This weaving of technology into the fabric of campus life helped Albion earn a top-10 ranking this year among Yahoo! Internet Life magazine’s “Most Wired” colleges in the nation. The magazine’s May 2000 edition, which provided an overview of the technology resources and support that it considered critical on college campuses, ranked Albion seventh among its peers nationally and also showed that the College was the top-rated institution in Michigan (for the second year in a row). Albion, in fact, was the only Michigan college or university to appear among the magazine’s top 50 “Most Wired” institutions. “This national recognition is affirmation of our new Vision, Liberal Arts at Work,” says President Peter Mitchell. “We have harnessed the power of information technology in service of the liberal arts in ways that very few other institutions have done. Albion’s technology-rich learning environment gives our students a tremendous advantage both now and into the future.” Improving the College’s technology infrastructure has had high priority over the past five years. In that time, Albion has provided access to the campus computer network and the Internet in every residence hall room, developed “smart” classrooms equipped with the latest hardware for using and displaying digital information, and installed new administrative software that supports everything from financial aid packaging to online course registration to charitable gift reporting.
Troy VanAken, appointed as vice president for information technology in June 1999, has spent much of his first year at Albion leading efforts to improve the campus network’s capabilities, revamp the campus e-mail system, upgrade the personal computers used by students, faculty and staff, and expand the skills training offered, especially in support of teaching and learning. He believes this sustained investment in information technology resources was a critical factor in the College’s high ranking among the nation’s “Most Wired” colleges. Albion’s campus-wide commitment to using information technology, VanAken says, “makes it easy to innovate in this area.” And as far as VanAken is concerned, the innovation is just beginning. With demand for the existing digitallyenhanced classrooms steadily rising, the College next year will introduce portable systems that will make it possible to bring advanced technology into virtually every classroom and lab on campus. The portable systems—containing a laptop computer and the latest in video projection and sound equipment—will simply plug into the network port available in every classroom. Faculty will supply their own instructional software to run on the system or instantly access the resources available on the Internet. “Having these capabilities opens up a whole new realm of instruction,” VanAken says.
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