7.0136 Computing Resources at Liberal Arts Colleges (1/37)

Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Tue, 24 Aug 1993 18:13:21 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 7, No. 0136. Tuesday, 24 Aug 1993.

Date: Tue, 24 Aug 93 13:14:51 -0400
From: dahanson@COLBY.EDU (David A. Hanson)
Subject: Computing Resources at Liberal Arts Colleges

For Willard's survey:

Colby College (in central Maine) is a Macintosh school with a
fairly high level of computer use. The College owns about 800 Macs,
and there is one for every faculty member who has requested one.
About half of our 1700 students have bought them from the Bookstore
(so we are not rushing to require purchase). There are several public
clusters, totalling 65 machines, with another six or so departmental
labs, so term papers are routinely written on a word processor.
We standardize on Microsoft Word, bundle it with every Bookstore purchase,
and have a software maintenance agreement with Microsoft. In this way
we can provide support with our necessarily small staff.

We have a unified campus network, with Internet access from
any mac in a public cluster. We are working actively toward wiring
all the residence halls, but so far lack the $2 million it should
cost us to finish the job. Meanwhile there is growing dial-up usage.
Otherwise, however, use of the mainframe by students has declined
rapidly, with the advent of Eudora for e-mail and TurboGopher.

Over a third of courses require some use of computers beyond
just word processing. This includes all departments and all majors.









David A. Hanson dahanson@colby.edu
Assoc. Dir. for Academic Computing voice/voicemail: 207-872-3291
Colby College fax: 207-872-3555
Waterville ME 04901 office: Lovejoy 105