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By fall 1998, every one of Penn State Altoona's 450-plus residence hall rooms will come equipped with a computer, making it the first college or university location in Pennsylvania to adopt such a program.
Under the program, an IBM or IBM-compatible computer will be placed in each room. The computers will be equipped with e-mail accounts, Internet access, and academic software, and protected under a five-year warranty. They will be installed this summer and will be in place and running in every room when students arrive in August for the fall 1998 semester.
Allen Meadors, dean and CEO of Penn State Altoona, started the program in response to concerns about overburdened computer labs.
"The program had its genesis 18 months ago when several commuter students came to me about overcrowding in the computer labs," Meadors said. "They are on campus only a set amount of time and, because of their jobs or home life, have only limited amounts of time when they can use campus computers."
Commuter students were concerned that the labs were almost always filled with students living in residence halls, Meadors said. Students living on campus were generally in no hurry to get back to their residence hall rooms, commuter students told Meadors.
But the commuter students aren't the only ones potentially left out in the cold. With an estimated 70 percent of computer lab users living on or near campus, and with more than 3,700 students enrolled at Penn State Altoona, computer time for any student can be hard to come by.
The addition of one computer lab this year helped ease the problem. But Meadors realized that wasn't going to be enough to solve the dilemma. Without building new computer facilities, the only other solution would be to convert more existing classes into computer labs -- an option Meadors felt was self-defeating.
Putting the computers in the residence halls is only one of several information technology projects at Penn State Altoona. New servers and new software will help increase speed while shortening downtime for both computer systems and students. Funding for the residence hall project will come from student computer fees, Penn State Altoona, the University's Housing and Food Services and private sources.
Penn State is recognized nationwide as a leader in using and developing new information technology. Penn State faculty, staff and students send up to 1.7 million e-mail messages a day, making it one of the largest Internet users in the nation. Penn State is also spearheading the development of Internet 2, a new, super-high-speed computer network that will link the nation's leading research universities and is expected to be many times faster than today's system.
