Are Computer Labs Still Needed on Campus?

During our first Brown Bag chat yesterday, the guest, Lev S. Gonick, vice president for information-technology services and chief information officer at Case Western Reserve University, was asked what he thought would be the future of computer labs on campus. He wrote:

“I don’t know if you’ve seen or visited Case’s Weatherhead School of Management. It is a Frank Geary building (http://weatherhead.case.edu/). It was the first building to support our switched gigabit network and the first building to open up with pervasive wireless. But because it was designed in the days before wireless, it was also built with computer labs. Fast forward 6 years and today there is only 1 lab left in the building and three other spaces have been converted to alternate space use allowing the Management School to attend to other priorities. At the same time, every student at Weatherhead has a wireless notebook. Literally hundreds of simultaneous users on the network. Most are using wireless in work groups or video conferencing with friends ‘back home’ (wherever that might be). I still see some RJ45 blue connections to the gig networks in the halls but most of the blinding speed stuff is left to the formal learning spaces and faculty offices and research facilities. That is some of our experience here at Case. My sense is that we (IT leaders) need to work with our professional colleagues in campus planning and work together to re-think space utilization both on the campus as well as, to reference an earlier comment I made, to finding ways to support mobile and telecommuting to support life style choices and hopefully contributing to quality of life both to work and study at our unviersities.”

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