November 2004 — Applications
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SJSU Gets Creative With Laptop Initiative
San José State University (SJSU), the metropolitan university empowering California’s Silicon Valley, is committed to preparing students to take leadership positions in the world community. Technology is an essential and integral component of this new world community, which is shown by the student experience at the university. The university’s Wireless Laptop Pilot Project is one program of many that is evidence of this commitment to excellence on the SJSU campus.
The Wireless Laptop Pilot Project is an academic technology initiative that is funded through a lottery grant. The success of the project relies heavily on faculty commitment. In March 2002, interested faculty and staff gathered to craft a vision that would create a dynamic and collaborative educational environment to enhance teaching and learning, creativity, scholarship, and global connectivity through a wireless laptop initiative. The goals of the project were:
To have SJSU become a leader in improving teaching and learning through the utilization of technology.
To increase communication and collaboration among faculty, s
tudents and the outside community.
- To build a community that fosters, supports, and rewards innovation and creativity.
To produce students who possess 21st century skills.
Enabling the Project
The university’s School of Art and Design, School of Journalism and Mass Communications, as well as its departments of Child and Adolescent Development, Communicative Disorders and Sciences, and Educational Leadership in its College of Education were first to participate in the project. To enable the project, all classrooms in these programs were equipped with access to the Internet and network resources through a wireless network. Then during the fall 2003 semester, students brought laptops to classes as required instructional material.
The first phase of the wireless network, which was implemented by the University Computing and Telecommunications department, was based on the 802.11b wireless network standard. The modular design of the Cisco Aironet 1200 Series wireless access point allows for the change from 802.11b to 802.11g or even 802.11a as easy as switching a module. The second phase of the wireless network used the Cisco 1200 access point with an 802.11g module. In order to address security issues, Bluesocket encrypts all logins to the network. Authentication to the wireless network is accomplished using a unique identifier provided by the Common Management System that PeopleSoft implemented on campus.
Faculty Support
One of the challenges facing the university was how to provide faculty with the support needed to effectively integrate technology into its curriculum; however, we found the best way to do this was to start early. Each faculty member in the project received a laptop and a license for the Adobe Creative Suite (www.adobe.com/education). In return, each faculty member promised to devote at least 15 hours of professional development time related to technology integration. Faculty started working with the laptops a year before the students were required to bring them to class as required instructional material. This gave faculty a full year to plan for the successful integration of student laptops into their curriculum.
