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I went through university in the UK during the last three years without owning my own laptop. Had they not had computer labs, I wouldn't have been able to get a

I went through university in the UK during the last three years without owning my own laptop. Had they not had computer labs, I wouldn't have been able to get any work done at all. We pay enough to study without having to fork out for compulsory gadgetry on top of that--part of the fees we pay are for the provision of facilities like computers. It might be OK for those with parental support, but I had to pay for it all myself and couldn't afford my own laptop while studying! (I had my own desktop at home in the final year, a hand-me-down bought from a friend for £20. I'm still using it to type this.) However, they could perhaps shrink the size of the labs; there were rooms with 50 or 60 PCs all switched on, wasting energy displaying that immensely irritating advertising screensaver and two or three of us working in them. Perhaps they could even go as far as to close labs and provide students with laptops with required study software pre-installed, but that's cloud-cuckoo land stuff...

jlees 18y ago
Stuff seems slightly different here (in the UK), at least based on what I've heard from students in the US and absorbed through popular culture (ha). I didn't have my own laptop most of the time I was an undergrad, and although students these days tend to have them rather than desktops, I don't see that many carrying them around/taking them to lectures/tutorials. Certainly if a student I taught whipped out their laptop I'd be amazed. I was taught computer science at a fairly 'traditional' institution where we learned from OHPs, Powerpoint and printed notes rather than live code demos that you could type out on your laptop and play with while the lecturer was talking. (I recently went to a tutorial day that was run like this and it was amazing; I'm not necessarily advocating learning to code on paper, but it does help you pass exams where you have to write code on paper..) Anyway, without computer labs many people out and about on campus wouldn't have e-mail or 'net access, and as others have pointed out it let us run a pretty complex setup for teaching (ML and Java through some insane whacked-out emacs customisation; to this day I use vim as a result of that teaching). I guess the general 'labs as somewhere the general student body goes to write essays aren't needed' applies, but a nice quiet room full of the sound of people typing is a great environment to get work done, and at least at the universities I'm familiar with in the UK, there's not much room for laptops. Plus laptops have distractions on, and lab machines don't.

jlees 18y ago

Stuff seems slightly different here (in the UK), at least based on what I've heard from students in the US and absorbed through popular culture (ha). I didn't have my own laptop most of the time I was an undergrad, and although students these days tend to have them rather than desktops, I don't see that many carrying them around/taking them to lectures/tutorials. Certainly if a student I taught whipped out their laptop I'd be amazed. I was taught computer science at a fairly 'traditional' institution where we learned from OHPs, Powerpoint and printed notes rather than live code demos that you could type out on your laptop and play with while the lecturer was talking. (I recently went to a tutorial day that was run like this and it was amazing; I'm not necessarily advocating learning to code on paper, but it does help you pass exams where you have to write code on paper..) Anyway, without computer labs many people out and about on campus wouldn't have e-mail or 'net access, and as others have pointed out it let us run a pretty complex setup for teaching (ML and Java through some insane whacked-out emacs customisation; to this day I use vim as a result of that teaching). I guess the general 'labs as somewhere the general student body goes to write essays aren't needed' applies, but a nice quiet room full of the sound of people typing is a great environment to get work done, and at least at the universities I'm familiar with in the UK, there's not much room for laptops. Plus laptops have distractions on, and lab machines don't.