Imagine carrying your entire courseload—your textbooks, Literature Humanities books, and the readings you print daily off of CourseWorks—in the palm of your hand.
This is exactly the kind of concept the Committee on Information and Communications Technology of the University Senate is hoping to explore. As of Feb. 11, the committee has been conducting an online university-wide survey to understand student’s use of new technologies to access information.
These new technologies include mobile devices, desktops, laptops, and e-readers—portable devices designed to replace printed material.
“We’ve noticed a paradigm shift,” said Julia Hirschberg, professor of computer science and committee chair, at the Jan. 29 University Senate plenary. “We get this in the New York Times everyday, recently with the iPad coming out—people are accessing documents through iPhones and e-readers. We want to know what people’s current usage patterns are and also what their requirements are for document processing.”
As of Feb. 16, nearly 4000 surveys—which ask students about their habits for collecting information—had been completed, and more will continue to be accepted for another two weeks.
“Before we had a lot of anecdotal information, and now we’re getting real data,” Hirschberg said in a recent interview.
Candace Fleming, committee member and Vice President of Information Technologies, said that this survey is responding to the demands of today’s world.
“Everyone uses technology on an increasing scale on a daily basis,” she wrote in an email. “There are increasing expectations to be able to search for, access, and utilize information including reading materials online.”
Though the focus of the survey is on the current needs and the interests of students and faculty, its results could one day prompt consideration of alternative forms of document access.
“We want Columbia to be able to formulate policies in the forefront of this paradigm shift, and not just be the last people to get on board with respect to publishing, IT, and possibility arrangements with technology providers,” Hirschberg said.
For Hatim Diab, also a committee member and Senior Staff Associate of the Center for Computational Learning Systems, the survey was cause for reflection. “It just hit me how much printing we do at Columbia,” he said.
In 2009, the Columbia University Purchasing Department reports purchases of 157,326,500 sheets of paper, 314,653 reams, through a university-contracted paper supplier. This number does not account for paper bought independently by individual purchasers.
“I’m not sure how long we can sustain such volumes of printing,” Diab said, speculating that a shift away from paper might be a future trend.
“Sooner or later there must be a paradigm shift,” Diab said. “Man began writing on stone, that was the medium, then wood, papyrus, paper, and then printing paper. Now you have screens. Are screens the next thing? I don’t know. Is it worth checking? Yes.”
Other universities have already begun to test the feasibility of incorporating e-readers into the classroom. During the 2009 fall term, the Office of Information Technologies at Princeton University piloted the Kindle DX in a small number of classes. Their online reports, which Hirschberg said the committee had looked into, reveal that although paper consumption was reduced, “the classroom experience was somewhat worsened, as study and reference habits of a lifetime were challenged by device limitations.”
The study recommended that e-reader manufacturers improve annotation tools, pagination, content organization, and develop a more “paper-like” user interface.
Diab acknowledged that the implementation of a similar program at Columbia might be met with resistance.
“A lot of people hate e-readers. Some people like paper. And we’re definitely not going to get rid of paper altogether,” he said, adding that the success of such a program would need the right technology.
Maureen Stimola, CC ‘12, said that an e-reader device could be useful, but only to a certain extent.
“For classes with a breadth of texts, it might be easier to compile them on one device so you don’t have dozens of books taking up shelf space. But with a text I’m planning to spend more time with, I like to have paper.”
Though Diab acknowledged it would likely be several years before Columbia implemented any new policies, he said that the current survey research gives Columbia the opportunity to be a leader in paperless technology.
“If Columbia University is on its own, it does nothing. But if we can get other universities on board and they have the same vision, this could really be something,” he said.
The survey can be found at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/sis/ereadersurvey/.
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