4 Days in the Digital Future

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Kathie Sigler, a self-described geek who is provost for operations at Miami Dade College, makes a pilgrimage to this glitzy city each year to try to determine what's coming next in technology, and what her sprawling community college should do about it.

Every January the Consumer Electronics Show here attracts more than 130,000 attendees and some 2,500 exhibitors. Picture walking into a Best Buy that is 33 times larger than usual. And instead of a uniformed sales staff, imagine plenty of scantily clad models and celebrity pitchmen explaining product features.

Ms. Sigler arrives for the first day of the event sporting a pair of running shoes with her dress pants, black sweater, and patterned scarf. "I dress like this for work, except for these," she says, pointing footward. Her beaming smile indicates that she is delighted to be here, despite the hassles involved in attending a show this big -- the noise, the long lines for taxis and food, the bustle that makes Manhattan sidewalks seem casual by comparison.

She says she's looking for ideas that could be translated into new campus services. And she wants a glimpse of the high-tech devices that students will soon be carrying in their backpacks. "I see the future, years and years out, in terms of, My goodness, what a world this is going to be!"

Attending similar shows in the past -- she has been going to this one, held by the Consumer Electronics Association, or to Comdex, an electronics show that is now defunct, for 17 years -- Ms. Sigler has made useful discoveries. Early on she learned of ways to build video walls -- banks of monitors that collectively form one display -- that Miami Dade installed in a new building. A few years ago, she first saw capacious storage devices that plug into USB drives, which led her to recommend that the college stop buying computers with floppy-disk drives. And it was in Las Vegas that she first saw the tablet PC, a laptoplike device that she is now trying to introduce on her campus.

It is more important than ever for college officials to be aware of trends in consumer electronics, says Richard N. Katz, a vice president of Educause, a higher-education technology group. About 20 years ago, when PC's and modems were oddities, colleges set the pace of information-technology use on campuses, pushing their students and faculty members to use computers. "Now what you have," says Mr. Katz, "is students in many ways driving the institutions, by showing up on campuses with a variety of devices and looking for and expecting the institutions to be able to support those devices."

Ms. Sigler is determined not to miss a thing at this year's show, so she is attending all four days of it. "I start on one end and I go up and down every aisle," she says. She eats a big breakfast so she doesn't have to stop again for food until the show wraps up for the day at 6 p.m. Occasionally she pauses to take a work call on her new Treo 600 cellphone, which has a built-in Palm Pilot that also lets her check e-mail.

"Oh, my God," she says, as she enters the Las Vegas Convention Center. "This is going to be a challenge to get through in four days."

The Little Guys

Ms. Sigler begins her trek on the outskirts of the South Hall, where many obscure companies have set up their booths.

"This," she says, "is where you see the things that either die and you never see again, or they're things that you see in the future and they then become bought by bigger companies."

As she roams the aisles, she talks with many of the company representatives to find out more about their wares. She asks about a small PC that, instead of a hard drive, uses a removable memory card barely bigger than a postage stamp. She tries out Remote Extender, which is essentially a remote control for your remote control. A representative tells her that its signal extends 150 feet, and she figures that it could help the college by allowing an audiovisual-support person to control equipment in large lecture rooms. "We have to play with it and see," she says.

Her eye lands on a display from a new company that packages its PC's entirely within flat-panel monitors, like Apple's latest iMac. (Miami Dade uses mostly PC's.) "Think about the space we would be able to save in the labs," she says.

The representatives are more than happy to answer her questions. After all, she wears a name tag identifying her as a "Buyer" -- and, she reminds them, her college has more than 60,000 students.

Ms. Sigler has worn many hats during her 35 years at Miami Dade. She became its first chief information officer in 1995, and she has been president of the Medical Center Campus. She does not have a formal technical background, but she firmly believes that every college administrator needs to feel comfortable asking tough questions about technology.

"My advice to administrators always is, You tell your people in the technology area that they are not to talk to you in alphabet soup," she says. "If you don't know what they're talking about, you stop them and say, Eliminate all those abbreviations. Talk to me in a day-to-day way about, How is this going to help students? How is this going to help faculty? How is this going to make this a better school?"

It was her son, Patrick, who got her excited about technology. She says she bought him his first computer, a Tandy TRS-80, back in the late 70s, when he was 8 years old, and found his enthusiasm contagious. He was killed in an accident involving a drunk driver 14 years ago, but Ms. Sigler imagines his reactions as she walks the aisles here: "I am hearing him say 'awesome' in the background."

Pushing for e-Books

After browsing for a couple of hours, Ms. Sigler switches gears, heading to a scheduled meeting with a company she has been negotiating with to bring electronic textbooks to her campus.

The company, MDRM, has graduated from its small-booth origins; it has recently been bought by SanDisk, a major manufacturer of memory cards for computers, digital cameras, and other devices.

SanDisk's display is huge, featuring a staircase leading to a second floor of displays and meeting areas. Three company representatives, including the director of education, sit down with Ms. Sigler. Dan Harkabi, vice president for secure-content solutions, pulls out a black briefcase and unsnaps it ceremoniously. Inside are about 30 prototypes of new USB key drives, which can be plugged into USB ports and serve as portable disk drives. The company has made the drives for a couple of years, but these are new shapes, sizes, and colors, designed to be more fashionable. Mr. Harkabi would not allow a reporter to take a picture of the prototypes. "You are maybe the first people to see it," he says.

What Ms. Sigler is more excited about, however, is a system developed by MDRM that allows electronic books to be saved onto the key drives in a secure way, reassuring publishers that students will not pirate the e-books. The company calls the product BookLocker.

Getting publishers to participate is taking longer than originally planned, however. Ms. Sigler had hoped to have permission to put every required textbook for the college's School of Education on the key drives by this semester. But that date has been pushed back until next academic year, in part because the publishers do not always have full electronic-reproduction rights to all of the illustrations used in their textbooks and have to negotiate the rights for the new format. "I'm dying to get these books," Ms. Sigler tells the SanDisk officials. She offers to provide the company a list of all the textbooks required by the college during a recent semester.

"We need you," Mr. Harkabi says. "We need you to create the pressure" on publishers to move faster.

The BookLocker drives are just one aspect of a pilot project at Miami Dade to provide tablet PC's to some students and faculty members in the School of Education. Ms. Sigler has been using a tablet PC ever since they were unveiled at the Comdex show here, four years ago, and she says they have features that are better for teaching and learning than those of standard laptop computers. Tablets' main advantage, she says, is that users can write directly on the screen, and the computer can save the image of the handwriting or translate it into electronic text. She brought her tablet PC with her to Las Vegas, although she did not lug it around during the show.

Celebrity Sightings

But tablet PC's have been slow to find a market. In fact, when Ms. Sigler heads over to the booth of Hewlett-Packard, the company that makes the tablet PC she uses, a representative tells her that the company is no longer marketing the devices to consumers. It has none on display at the show.

"How do you expect these things to catch on if you don't have them out where consumers can see them?" she says as she leaves the booth.

"Look, there's Tom Arnold," she says later in the afternoon, passing the booth of XaviX, a company that makes sports video games. The actor is giving a demonstration of an electronic baseball game that lets players swing a real bat to try to hit the virtual ball. When a volunteer from the audience gets a hit, Mr. Arnold says, "You got wood on it, or whatever that is -- plasma."

"That's pretty neat," says Ms. Sigler before resuming her quest for the next big thing.

She notes some general trends: Many devices, including watches, cameras, and even pet collars, are now wireless. Several booths offer solar-powered charging units for cellphones or other small devices.

Copies of Apple's iPod music player are rampant. "There are way too many MP3 players that have the same capacity," she says.

Many devices offer portable video. Ms. Sigler orders a Zen Portable Media Center, made by Creative Technology Ltd., to try out for herself. The $500 machine, about the size of a hardback book, can store up to 85 hours of movie or television footage, which can be viewed on its four-inch screen.

Even some of the cellphones on display can play stored video or receive television signals.

She worries, however, that such devices will create new distractions for students during class, or that new wireless equipment could lead to new ways for students to cheat. And as students consume more and more professional video entertainment, she speculates, their expectations for professors' classroom performance might change as well.

Of course, much of the technology at this show has little application on a college campus. Ms. Sigler watches demonstrations at booths displaying home-theater equipment, including couches with built-in bass speakers powerful enough to make the furniture shake during exciting moments of movies. She wonders if the college could work with the companies to set up certification programs to service the equipment: "My immediate thought is, How can I train students to repair this stuff?"

She also notices a number of devices with advanced handwriting recognition, and others with improved voice recognition.

"No more of this Clapper -- clap on, clap off," she says, referring to a gizmo, sold on television, that allows a user to control lights by clapping. "You can say, Lower the lights, and it does."

In a telephone interview after the show is over, Ms. Sigler points out that she made it through the entire exhibit hall (although she admits rushing through a large section of automotive technology). "It was totally exhausting," she says.

Of course, not all college officials are willing to put in that much legwork. Her advice to administrators who want to keep up with technology: "Read whatever you can get your hands on -- even skimming helps -- on future technologies and the use of technology at colleges. Talk often to your IT folks about trends they see happening."

And, of course, if possible, go to the show.