Social Computing in Student PopulationsShortly after I sold
my company (I was the Chief Technology Officer of a Web design firm
in Manhattan's Silicon Alley), Hunter College hired me to teach
classes in Web design and uses of the Internet. One of the first
things I did while setting up my lab was to drag an old computer
into the hall outside my office, connect it to the Internet, and
give students unfettered access to it. My thought was to bring the
students into the present -- little did I know that they would show
me the future.
For a few years now, there has been a deathwatch for the personal
computer. It is an article of faith in much of my industry that
every 15 years or so sees a major shift in computing hardware, and
since the PC supplanted the mainframe in the early 80s, it's time,
or so the thinking goes, for the PC in turn to give way to the "Next
Big Thing", as these shifts are sometimes jokingly called.
That shift is happening today -- I can see it in the way my
students are using the computer outside my office door -- but unlike
the previous revolution, this change is not about hardware but about
patterns of use. The age of the personal computer is ending because
computers are no longer personal, they're social. My students are
using the Web not just as a research tool but as a way to
communicate with one another and to organize their lives. Web-based
email, from companies like Hotmail and Yahoo, forms the center of
their computer use; they use it for everything from communicating
with professors to keeping in touch with family overseas to
organizing forays to the pizza parlor.
Furthermore, they're not just using computers to run their social
lives; they've begun to treat computers themselves as social
objects, like phones. If you need to check your voice mail, it
doesn't matter to you what phone you use; any phone with an outside
line is the same as any other. Even if its someone else's phone, and
they've programmed the speed dialer to suit themselves, you can
still use it to get to your messages. In the same way, any computer
with an "outside line" to the Internet is as good as any other for
checking email, even if someone else owns that computer and they've
got their own programs on the hard drive. From my students' point of
view, a computer is merely a way to get access to their stuff
(email, web syllabi, online research, et al.) rather than being a
place to store their stuff. Hotmail wins over Eudora because with
web-based email, they can get their mail from any computer they
happen to be at, whether they own it or not.
This seemingly minor change has major ramifications for academic
uses of computers. If a computer is for access to a network and not
for storage or local computation, then the definition of a "good"
computer changes. Any computer connected to the Internet is as good
as any other computer connected to the Internet, and any computer
not connected to the Internet is no good at all. Furthermore, the
impact on student use is enormous. If computers are social objects
like phones are, then any computer is their computer as long as
their hands are on the keyboard. This is the real demise of the
"personal" computer - many of my students don't have their own
computers, but that doesn't stop them from running their lives via
email.
This isn't just a question of affordability - the PC is coming
unglued in many academic environments. An affluent student who has
more than one computer has given up on the idea of the "personal"
computer just as surely as the student who decides not to buy a
computer at all. A student on a wired campus, with computers in the
classroom and the dorm room, sooner or later realizes that it is
easier to save their work on the network or email it to themselves
than to carry disks or even laptops back and forth. Even faculty,
usually the people with the most computing power on their desks, are
seeing Web-accessible research and email discussion lists become as
much a part of their academic work as the data stored on their hard
drive.
The personal has been taken out of the personal computer because
the Internet has transformed computing into a social activity. With
email from Hotmail, a free home page from Geocities, a personalized
news page from my.yahoo, there is no need to own your own computer,
lug a laptop from place to place, or pay $20 a month for Internet
access. Computing is where you find it -- campus labs, work, an
Internet cafe -- and the guts of any individual computer become
unimportant. The old Macintosh vs. Windows debate is meaningless if
they both run Netscape, since social computing turns the browser
into the operating system and the Internet into the hard drive.
Looking at my students instinctive sense of network use, I've
boiled the elements of social computing down into three basic
principles:
Hardware is Boring.
Who cares what kind of computer you have? The old concerns of the
PC era - which operating system, what CPU speed, how much RAM - have
been replaced by the concerns of connection - dial-up or ethernet,
which connect speed, what browser version. If all hardware can
connect, each individual piece is less important.
Imagine that your institution plans to upgrade your
computer, but that you have to choose: you can have either double
the speed of your CPU, or double the speed of your Internet
connection. Which would you choose?
Computers are for Finding, not Keeping.
Finding new information is more important than storing old
information. A computer with a CD-ROM drive only becomes more
valuable when you spend the time and money to buy a new CD, while a
computer with network access becomes more valuable every time
someone creates a new web site, which happens several times a day,
for free. Computers used for keeping information lose value over
time, as the information on them goes out of date. Computers used
for finding information increase in value over time, as the breadth
and depth of the accessible information increases with no additional
investment.
Imagine another choice: your institution will pay to
quadruple the size of your hard drive, so you can store more stuff
locally, or pay for you to get access to the online archives of
the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Encyclopedia
Brittanica. Which would you choose?
Information Leaks Out of its Containers.
Information can no longer be trapped in objects. Multi-media is
leaking out of CD-ROMs and into Web sites, music is leaking out of
CDs and into Internet radio, text is leaking out of books and into
online databases. At first, online academic materials were simply
additions to existing research infrastructure, but they are starting
to replace, rather than augment, traditional methods: MIT's Sloan
School of Business now only accepts electronic applications, and
1998 is the last year that Encyclopedia Brittanica will publish a
paper edition.
A third choice: imagine that your next computer can
have either a CD-ROM drive or a connection to the Internet, but
not both. Which would you choose? You may not face
choices as stark as the ones outlined above, but your students do.
Lacking an office, living on a budget, possibly balancing work and
school, they will gravitate towards social computing wherever
possible. Why spend money if they don't have to? Why pay for a fast
CPU if they have a slow modem, why pay for a large disk drive if
TIME magazine stores all their articles online, why pay for a CD-ROM
if the same material exists on the Web?
The changes in a campus are which embraces social computing are
far-reaching. Computers become less a product than a service, less
an occasional and expensive purchase like office furniture, and more
a steady stream of small purchases, like office supplies. PCs wither
and networks bloom, and value is created by access instead of
ownership. Anyone who has done the math for a 'one computer per
student' policy sees millions of dollars tied up in machines that
are unused most of the day, and that's when the student body is
affluent enough to afford such a requirement. For a student body
already straining to meet tuition, the idea of personal computing is
an absurdity, but social computing is not.
If hardware is boring, then homogeneity of computing resources
becomes unimportant. With the browser as the interface and the
Internet as the hard drive, the differences between a 486 running
Linux and a Pentium II running Windows 98 shrink in importance, and
instead of a massive overhaul of computer labs every 3-5 years, it
becomes possible to replace 20% of the machines annually. This takes
advantage of continually rising quality and falling cost, raises the
quality of the average machine every year, eliminates the problem of
wheezing equipment at the tail end of a "complete replacement"
cycle, and frees up low-end machines for use as hallway terminals or
print servers as a side-effect.
If computers are for finding instead of keeping, then then the
role of the librarian changes drastically. With a computer as a
finding tool, every library suddenly acquires a rapidly expanding
global collection. Librarians will be increasingly freed from the
part of their job that turns them into literate janitors, constantly
reshelving paperback copies of The Iliad, while returning to their
roles as taxonomists and sleuths, guiding students to useful
resources and teaching them how to separate the good from the
mediocre.
If information leaks out of objects, then every professor becomes
a publisher, and the separation between the classroom lecture and
the textbook begins to fade. "Handouts" handed out over the web
spare faculty the trip to the copy center (and the attendant cost),
online syllabi don't get out of date because the URL always points
to the most recent copy, and one semester's preparation means less
editing to make it ready for future classes. An entire textbook can
be built up online, one lecture at a time, and tested in the real
world before it is published, rather than after.
For us as members of the faculty, staff and administration of
colleges and universities, the ramifications of the rise in social
computing are clear. The amount of money and effort it takes for a
"One personal computer per student" program puts it out of the reach
of many institutions and many student bodies even as access to the
Internet is becoming increasingly critical for both academic work
and social life on college campuses. The rise in socal computing
suggests a way to bridge that gap, by providing the advantages of
access without the overhead of ownership.
Our students are gravitating towards the Internet, using it in
ways that aren't intuitive for those of us still using personal
computers. They will tend to prefer connectivity over storage and
accessibility over raw processing power. If we aren't sensitive to
their preference for cheaper computers out where they can use them
rather than expensive computers under lock and key, we will end up
misallocating precious resources in ways that aren't in our students
best interests, or, ultimately, in our own.
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