I gave a talk at Harvard this evening (helicopter aerodynamics, to the flying club, in preparation for giving rides from the athletic fields tomorrow). The venue was a renovated classroom in a building occupying about $20 million of real estate in Harvard Square. The university’s $40 billion cash hoard was sufficient to pay for a blackboard, a box of chalk, a video projector, and a fancy A/V panel. However, they couldn’t come up with another $300 for a permanently installed Dell PC that would be hardwired to the A/V panel and to the Internet. So a 20-minute harlequinade ensued in which students attempted to hook up a laptop both to the Internet (wireless) and to the projector (wired). They were never fully successful in getting a large PDF to load.
How many university classes are there in which someone wouldn’t want to project a diagram or something else from a Web server somewhere (see this older posting, for example)? If the answer is “almost none”, why don’t the schools buy some cheap PCs and nail them down in the classrooms?
I assume this was a College/FAS venue. All the classrooms here at the Kennedy School, down by the river, have permanently installed computers. Not sure if they are $300 Dells, but they work.
You could also ask “how many professors or speakers don’t bring their own laptops when giving a talk?” I suspect the answer is “almost none”. When I was at Carnegie Mellon they installed a PC in every lecture hall along with the fancy video projector systems — and they (for the most part) remained unused. People who used them discovered the disaster which is “presentation portability” — you load up your carefully tuned PowerPoint presentation, and find out that it looks different on this PC than yours. Perhaps it is the resolution change has moved things around; perhaps the slightly different fonts cause all of your math to appear in symbols instead of greek; perhaps the subtlety different software revisions mean your animations (if you really think animations add to instead of detracting from a good talk) go haywire; maybe the last speaker accidentally infected the PC with a virus. Who knows? Anyone who gave talks regularly at CMU learned that if you want your talk to look good and your computer to behave as you like it, it is easier to bring your own laptop and play the “will it work with this projector?” game than to rely on someone else’s PC.
Perhaps the smart folks at Harvard figured this out too — why provide (and support) a PC which hardly ever gets used? (It sounds like the folks who invited you for the talk should have told you to bring a laptop. It sucks that an AV issue messed with your talk. 🙁 )
Not to plug in my own school… but amazed HBS does not have this, more considering that IESE was in many ways modeled after it! All lecture rooms have a built in computer in a rack, connected to a LCD at the professors desk, the projector, and a wireless mouse for helping on presentations. Connected to the net, of course. With a video cable so you can plug in your laptop. Many rooms are wired so that virtual classes or conferencing can be held with other classrooms around the affiliate schools in the world – or next door.
All study rooms – many, always available for students – have 1 or 2 computers, with free printers at the room or nearby. They are always on good working order, so many students do not bother taking a laptop and use these instead. So they are used, all the time!
The rooms on the new campus (check it out in the site, amazing building with a beautiful vista of barcelona) have a new system with a touchscreen system, from where you control all of the room – lighting, projector screens (3 of them in the room), sound, videoconferencing, recording on a DVD – realtime, on the computer under the desk, which is nice for saving sessions – etc. This system was lovely for any programmer guy, as its linking a bunch of heterogeneous hardware on one software platform (yeah, Windows based).
Never had virus or configuration problems, which is a new thing for me in a Windows environment. Its a domain, things are locked down – you cannot install software – but you can execute stuff of your USB card if you need to (firefox portable, for example). Your user keeps your documents and settings wherever you log in in campus.
Not to say all is nice and dandy – the intranet is quite old and outdated, it works, but its ugly and inflexible. Its based on MS Sharepoint.
Besides the good reasons mentioned above, the $300 purchase cost of the PC is just the tip of the iceberg. In a review I conducted of a university IT operation, PC maintenance (such as scraping off malware and reloading the OS) turned out to consume a surprisingly large proportion of overall IT costs. And, because such work was done by student workers, the quality was uneven and nobody depended on it being done correctly. That’s why the smart instructors brought their own computer if they wanted their presentation to work.
I’m looking forward to these things becoming reliable appliances. The “Big Switch” is on its way.
Dennis: I was at a hotel in Cape Town, South Africa with a few public Internet terminals. After each person signed off, the computer was restarted from a read-only image of some flavor of Windows with a reasonable number of programs and plug-ins installed. Any malware picked up during mail-reading and surfing would have been history after the logout/login. That PC would have been perfectly adequate for most university lectures.
Chris: I guess I wasn’t thinking about PowerPoint virtuosi, but rather simple folk who use chalk, Web pages, JPEGs, PDFs, and other basic Web documents to illustrate points.
I recently gave a talk at my alma mater, LSU, and was pleasantly surprised to find PCs and projectors in the lecture rooms. I was told that the machines are “sanitized” weekly, but I don’t know exactly what tasks that term entails. My presentation looked great, I could jump on the Web to find a link to a book, and a couple of students could pull up class projects relevant to my talk. If LSU can do it, Harvard can, too. (I never thought I would say that.)