College tour
The new building has IWs in each room (240+ across all the campusses), with PCs in teaching rooms. Staff do not have laptops, staff PCs are allocated to staff rooms. There is a campus wide wifi for students so they can use their own laptops – the students authenticate and are taken to a landing page. They can’t print yet but that is being worked on. Some classrooms have pop up PCs on flat desk. The point was made that the layout of the desks necessitated by these PCs was a bit traditional (in rows).
In the learning centre the students can talk quietly, sit at drop in computers, some of which are Macs for the designer students. Some of the other drop in computers are Macs but dual booting into Windows. FaceBook and other social networking sites are not blocked. I asked a group of students if they used FaceBook for college work and they said they used the chat function to talk about things so as not to disturb other students in the centre. They also remind people about deadlines. The College has some software that allows access rights to be assigned flexibly, and allows blanket policies for cases where there is a duty of care.
There are IWs in the catering kitchen, the workshops, the salon and the theatre. Another post soon…