Technology on Campus
The School of Arts & Sciences is dedicated to providing students and faculty with the most up-to-date technology to make their scholarly work easier, more efficient and wide reaching. The University of Richmond has made that same commitment by providing students, faculty and staff with a truly wireless campus. Wireless at Richmond doesn’t just mean in certain buildings. Wireless at Richmond means Internet access indoors and outdoors, anywhere, all the time. Students don’t just sit in the library and wait for inspiration to come to them; they find a place on campus that inspires them and the library comes to them.
Technology permeates the Arts & Sciences curriculum. Faculty and students in the sciences take advantage of the school’s biological imaging lab, which has a laser scanning confocal microscope, a scanning electron microscope and a transmission electron microscope.
In the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, students use tablet PCs in class as part of a National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored initiative. The PCs are loaded with a networking software package called DyKnow that allows each student to sync their tablet with the instructor’s machine. Students are relieved of the burden of note taking and allowed to concentrate on learning the material since data flows seamlessly between their instructor’s tablet and their own.
Smart classrooms are scattered across campus, featuring state-of-the-art multimedia equipment and smart boards that integrate presentations, note taking and Internet access into one seamless application. The Department of Journalism has a 16-workstation Macintosh lab, with Final Cut Pro editing software for video and the full Adobe design package for designing graphics and laying out text and images.
Professors in a range of disciplines have taken advantage of the iPod Initiative on campus, integrating the use of iPods into their courses. As part of the initiative, run through the University’s Technology Learning Center, students receive iPods to use throughout the semester and professors who integrate the iPods into their courses receive one to keep. Computer science professor, Barry Lawson, recently taught an operating systems class in which students loaded the open source software Linux onto their iPods. Malcolm Hill and Amy Treonis, with the Department of Biology, used iPods in their class, Integrative Biology I: Evolution, Diversity of Life and Ecology. Students prepared their own podcasts about various topics of interest in the course and recorded lectures as a means of studying the material.