The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, January 14, 1986 - Page 5 COMPUTERS Leading te campus computer charge Editors Note: Daily reporter Jerry Markon and News Editor Thomas Miller met with University Vice Provost for Information Technology Douglas Van Houweling in December to talk about the new computing fee and other computing activites around campus. The first excerpt appeared December 10, 1985. Here is the second, and final installment from that discussion. DAILY: Some members of the state legislature have criticized the University for passing the fee, calling it a veiled tuition increase. Were you and the other executive officers aware of the state opposition when you were pushing the fee? VAN HOUWELING: No. As I think you know already, we talked about the fee entirely separate from tuition. We already had fees in engineering and business, and in August, we went ahead and raised those fees to $100 and $150 dollars. And then in Septem- ber. - with some delay for at least some student input, as I said earlier - we went ahead with the all-University fee and none of us anticipated - I didn't, but maybe some people did - that the state would mistake that for a tuition increase. In retrospect perhaps I should have been more aware of that, and maybe we could have figured out how to communicate with those people more effectively. We had been asking the legislature for funding to do something like this for several years, and I think the legislature by and large knew we had some fees, so I guess we were a little surprised that there was so much con- cern about this. I think it's fair to say that while I don't want to minimize that concern, it hasn't been a widespread concern, and we're talking with state legislators now to fry and get them to see that this fee is in fact an effort on our part to save the state and the students money, as op- posed to trying to make things more expensive. I think we're making progress, but I don't think we'll ever change everybody's mind on anything. D: There's a school of thought among students that says, "Look, I'm in engineering and over four years I pay $1200 for computers. And if I can buy a Zenith personal computer cheaper, tell me why I should pay a fee? VH: I think that's a good question and it's a question we've gotten not only from students but from parents. As I told.MSA, of all the things that we're doing, only about half of the money is being spent on putting these big public work stations in. The other half is being spent on expanding the com- munications network, getting the library linked in, helping faculty and students generate course material - a whole series of things. Although those other things wind up benefitting V-P Douglas Van ouweling pushes ahead a student who owns their own work station more than it does the students who use a shared work station because let's face it, if you own your own machine, you're going to use it more than four or five hours a week, which is about the average we can get out of the shared work stations. So, you'll get a lot more active use out of that other 50% of that money. Even though you can say that only 50% of your money is being spent on something that you don't already have personally, your level of use will get a lot more out of that investment than most of our students. So, I didn't think you're getting short-changed if you get your own. I think thethings we're doing mean that we've enhanc- ed your investment substantially. There's another issue here to, and that is most students do a lot of their work outside their home so having work stations in libraries so that if you're doing something at your Zenith at your apartment several miles from campus, during the evening or a break between classes, you can come on campus and work on it. That's also very useful, so it's really finding the right combination, and I think in fact over the next four or five years, more and more students will own their own. machines. We'll spend a smaller proportion of the total money we have on providing shared work stations, and more on making sure we provide good services to students who own their own work stations. And that's a transition that's going to take place as these machines become more power- ful and less expensive, sort of at the same time. We're really trying to build a program that allows us to go from the present to that future without requiring our students at the present to buy their own workstations. For a lot of our students, that would be a large financial burden. And I think of dubious value for a large number of our students. I don't think that a lot of our students don't have 2 or 3 hours of work a day to do on a personal com- puter. D: You've said that much of the technology currently in place will be obsolete in two or three years? VH: I wouldn't say two. I would say three. That's why we've got the fee in a large extent. It's unlikely that the fee will go away three years from now. What I see happening is here at the beginning we've got a fee that is directed very heavily to remodeling and/or building enough space to provide roughly one workstation for every fifteen students. Or to put it another way, to provide four hours per week per student of access. Those numbers are best guesses of what we really need in shared facilities. It may be a little high or a little low, but somewhere in the neighborhood. What I expect will happen over the three years is that we'll put in every year progressively more powerful and more advanced workstation clusters. D: In the engineering college, despite the college's commitment to com- puters, there have been a lot of student complaints that they never use computers, that they don't have to use them in the classroom. Is there any administrative plan to push com- puter usage in the classroom? VH: A main portion of the new program is in fact directed at providing incentives for both faculty and students to develop software for course application. While this isn't all nailed down yet, I wouldn't be sur- prised if we had something in place by next year. We might have a program that gives out some kind of award to the best 3 pieces of student-written tools that help students discover not just whether they've got a sentence spelled right, but whether or not the grammar is correct, whether they're using the passive case too much, if they've got too many adjectives, or if their sentences are too long. D: A computer editor? VH: Yeah, really it is. We're looking into software developed AT&T called the Writers Workbench, and we're going to be testing a number of things so we're not looking at just the editing part of writing, but at the whole process. We already have programs in Biology and Chemistry where com- puters are used to help us teach cour- sework, and the same thing is hap- pening in a number of places in engineering, although it's certainly not pervasive yet. I expect to see quite a computer, and they go off and do it on the computer. Using the computer in some creative way, they come backs into the classroom and hand it in with% some kind of beautiful display, andf the faculty member looks at it andt says "gee, I never thought of it thatI way." Most importantly, the otherI students take a look at it and say, "gee, that looks pretty snazzy. Maybe I'd better figure out how to use it." What we'll find is that these machinesI will be used as a general took by stud- ents, and the students will become familiar with them in ways that we really don't anticipate yet, becausei that's the pattern we're already1 seeing. The issue, then, is how do students learn to use computers so they can do those kinds of things. I really have two answers to that question. The first is that we have smart students, really smart students; here, and these machines really; aren't that hard to figure out. Most of our students aren't going to need much help. The second thing is that; we're putting in one place after another around the University, cour- ses to help students learn the basics. D: There's been a lot of talk about this expansion, particularly in targeting it at the residence halls in the short term. In the long term, though, are we going to see more of these large; clusters in other buildings than residence halls? VH: That's a question that goes back to something I just talked about. That is, if you really want to get people started in technology, what you want to do is catch them during their freshmen year. About 95 percent of our students live in residence halls so one of the first things we must make sure we do is get the residence halls reasonably well-equipped and catch that incoming cohort of students and make them reasonable prepared as they move on up through the system. But obviously, since most of them y then leave the residence halls, we've got to make sure that we have access other places, and the residence halls I think will saturate quickly. There's really not much space in the residence halls to put this kind of equipment, and it's really not in my view ap- propriate to put big clusters in the residence halls, with some excep- tions. Most of the clusters in the residence halls will be small clusters, I like to think of them as clusters that people can go to in their pajamas. Since they're fairly close to their rooms people can go there and work conveniently on them when they want to. And I hope that will make it possible for people who don't have the money or the incentive to buy their own computers to have really good access during their freshman years. Then, for their sophomore and later years, we're going to have to make sure there are a lot of clusters outside the residence halls. We're talking, for instance, about putting a cluster down on southycampus. Now that doesn't make any sense in terms of where students go to classes but in terms of where students are living that makes perfect sense. There's a lot of student housing down that way. We'll try to put some things up on North Campus by the married student housing. There's a number of other places where we're going to try to make sure we get close to the students in a lot of places around the University, and we'll probably have to build some new space. D: You've said that you plan to upgrade the present clusters to provide a better study atmosphere for students. How exactly do you plan to do this? VH: I mean that we don't have ,just tables and chairs, but we have work stations furnished with a design, with something to break up the noise, more square feet per work stations so at least some are big enough for two or three people to work there - a lot of stuff like that. D: When a large University like this makes a commitment to spend that kind of money, .obviously there are going to be a lot of companies who want to take advantage of it. How closely is the University working with these people? What kind of things should we be looking for? VH: Very closely. We're establishing a new organization we're calling the Center for Information Technology. And what that organization is is an or-, ganization that is going to help us build technology that is more advan- ced than anything we can buy off the shelf by working together with major companies who are anxious to see that technology used in a large campus environment. That's part of our plan to have the most advanced facilities that we can have here, but more impor- tant than that, is something we call in- formation technology integration, because a lot of this stuff doesn't work together very well. And the whole focus of this organization is to make all of the campus workstations work together in a smoother way, making them easier to use, which we think is very important to the students. That organization will be funded with donations mainly from cor- porations. The other thing is that we have very attractive discounts from the major manufacturers which we work with, and donations which we work very hard to achieve from all the major players in the business. Van Houweling and other Univer- sity computer experts will be available tonight from 7-9 p.m. at Markley's North Pit to answer student computing questions. Daily Photo by SCOTT LITUCH' Douglas Van Houweling, the University's Vice Provost for Information Technology, says that students will find a variety of uses for computers, besides word processing. ' instructors create software, or a group which will sup- port faculty in the development of ap- plications, including experts, some programmers, and a graduate program so the faculty can apply to get money to do this work, take time off, or hire some graduate students to help. One of the things I've discovered in the past is that faculty won't really start to commit their time until they see that the institution's made a commitment to make sure that this technology is available to students because the faculty have a lot of pressure on their time and they're not going to put their time in if they're not sure the students are going to use it. It may be that the most important thing has already been done, which is to say to the faculty that we're going to provide access to the students so you can now go ahead and develop things for the students to use. D: How will an average student, who may know nothing about computers, use them other than writing papers for their classes? VH: I could probably take the next two hours and describe to you one use after another for instance - this is related to writing papers but it's not what you would think of as writing papers - I just came from a lunch with Bill Ingram, who directs the in- troductory writing program. We spent some time talking over new computer an explosion of that kind of use. I ac- tually think that what's going to happen is that rather than whole courses being put on the computer, which I don't think really makes a lot of sense in most cases, what I think faculty are going to do is look at their courses and say 'what are the things we're really having a hard time teaching, and is there a way we can use a computer to help us get those notions across - whether it's a student being able to get more practice and drill, whether it's a student being able to visualize things that are hard to visualize without a good graphics display, or whatever it is. In some cases the response will be "no the computer can't help you with that," but in other cases, the computer will be able to help. I see sort of one target of dif- ficulty after another being tackled across the curriculum. My bet is three or four years from now the average student during a semester will have occasion to use a computer several times for specific course assignmen- ts. Now, I think it's important for me to say that in terms of the ways stud- ents use computers, I'll be surprised if the most exciting things aren't things that students themselves get to do with computers. What we're seeing in places where students have a lot of access to computers is that students see a class assignment where the faculty member never thought to use e ectronic (Continued from Page 1) * models. The same process can be ap- plied to courses in chemistry, art history, and even poetry. "The Learning Tool" also can be used in foreign language classes - even those with non-Romanic alphabets such as Hebrew and Russian, Kozma said. The program permits students to develop tests on the notes they enter into the com- puter, and to show relationships bet- ween different parts of language. "The package has a lot of tools," Kozma said. "To write papers, stud- ents can cut pieces from their notes and use them in conjunction with more powerful word processing packages. THE PROGRAM also allows students to sift through their notes notebook' with a key word search to retrieve a specific detail. Kozma and Van Roekel are wonder- ing whether or not students will take the time to feed their notes into the program - the one hitch to making their learning aid eventually marketable. They hope to put their package of programs on sale to the public next fall. To test "The Learning Tool," the men now are offering free use of it to any interested University student in return for his evaluation. Students who wish to participate should contact Laurie Atwood at 764-8420. The program is funded through the University's Office of Vice Provost for Technology, in part by money collec- ted by the $50 computer fee assessed to every undergraduate student this term. TEN-PACKS W GOET ANUS ~25 PACK PLUS $4.00 REBATE ON FUJI FILM FLOPPY DISK --- j ENROLL TODAY in Hillel's JEWISH LEARNING CENTER Registration Jan. 13 -17 Classes begin Jan. 20 (for 9 weeks) BONUS PACK INCLUDES VALUABLE OFFERS ON FUJI PRODUCTS PLUS FREE ROLLF p. , What's Happening Recreational Sports Introductory Hebrew 1i-es & Thurs. 7-8: 15 p.m. Beginning Siddur Readings [Tues. 7-8: 15 p.m1. Intermediate Hebrew Tues. X&"Thurs. 8:30-9:45 p.m. Advanced H ebrew Thurs. 7:15-9:301 p.m. Beginners-Adv. Beginners Yiddish Wed. 7-8: 15 p.m. Basic Judaism Sion. 7-9:45 p.m.. 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