By Doug Anderson
doug@newsroom.byu.edu
Laptops have multiplied on the BYU campus like fungus in a lab experiment gone awry.
Some of the exponential-laptop growth is due to the requirement a few schools within the university have made that students have them. But even though students all over campus are getting wired, it may not be necessary to rush out to buy one quite yet.
The decision requiring all BYU students to own a laptop is nebulous and uncertain, said Jim Sands, customer representative of the Information Technology Department.
Sands said more likely than a laptop requirement is a PC requirement. He said administrators are closely watching schools like Wake Forest that have already implemented a PC-requirement policy to see how students, faculty and administrators adapt to the change.
Debbie Ruse, MBA program administrator in the Marriott School of Business, said the first year of requiring graduate students to own a laptop has been successful. She said professors have traded copy machines for placing class syllabi and assignments on the web, cutting down on paper costs and giving added emphasis to knowledge of the Internet.
In regard to professors and their use to the Internet and students, Ruse said, 'In everything they do, they're having them go to the web.'
Kevin Worthen, associate dean in the College of Law, said requiring law students to have laptops has eliminated fairness issues when professors e-mail assignments to students in their classes.
'We don't have to wonder, 'Is this fair? Should we be doing this? Does everyone have access to this?'' he said.
Worthen said they chose to require students to own laptops over PCs primarily because of their portability. Students can take them to class to take notes or hook up to the web to conduct research at one of the fully-wired carrels in the Law Library, he said.
'You can't have all that functionality with the PC,' Worthen said.
A laptop acts as an in-class tool to keep lecture notes, said Nathan Ball, a senior from London, England, majoring in Political Science.
Ball said the majority of his professors have begun using Power Point to present lectures to the class. He said typing the slide presentation notes on a laptop in class is more effective than writing them by hand. Ball said requiring students to have them could be potentially promising.
'It would be beneficial if there was an infrastructure to support it,' he said.
Amy Rasmussen, from Denver, Colo., a first-year graduate student of accounting, said she could see how a requirement to own laptops could be useful, but also saw problems if the BYU required all students to own them.
'There wouldn't be enough places to hook up for everybody,' she said.
Sands, who acts as a liaison between students and the Information Technology Department, said the university has considered a wireless-laptop requirement. He said problems with wireless laptops could surface, however, because of slow Internet speed and the possibility of students crossing Internet signals in neighboring classrooms.
Regardless of the difficulties, Sands said a decision must be forthcoming for the good of BYU. He said slow-decision making, like the one to allow attachments with e-mail on Route Y which is yet to be implemented, could put BYU behind the technological standard.
'If we don't stay on top of technology, we're going to be in trouble,' he said.