At higher-education conferences, speakers often talk about student demands for technology, but students themselves are rarely there to give their own views. A group of five students from several colleges gave a candid assessment of their technology wish list today during a session at the Higher Education Leadership Forum, a two-day event sponsored by The Chronicle and Gartner, a technology-consulting firm.
Overall, the students called for more technology on campus—more wireless access, more virus
protection, and more technical support, among other things. But technology can also be a distraction, some said.
"It’s been detrimental to my education," said Cliff Stephens, a master’s student in decision information sciences at the University of Florida. "When the professor is up there reading a slide from PowerPoint that you can download later, Solitaire is a pretty big temptation." In an interview after the talk, he said the problem is more pronounced in IT classes because professors teaching them tend to "lack interpersonal skills."
"A company wouldn’t throw all this technology at their employees and not train them," he said, but that’s exactly what many colleges do.
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