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 When FSU President Sandy D'Alemberte learned he had cancer, he and his
wife turned to the Internet for information.
"We were amazed at how much very useful information one could pick up in
a short period of time -- hospitals, doctors, details of procedures," D'Alemberte
said. "We actually decided the doctor, the hospital and the procedure by
reviewing this information."
For D'Alemberte and thousands of others at Florida State, the Internet is
changing campus life forever.
FSU now offers free Internet access to all students. (At UF,
undergraduates pay for the service, although the fees are low.)
Nearly 10,000 computers on the FSU campus are connected to the
Internet, and a quarter of those were added just in the last year. Campus
officials estimate that more than half the student body is on line, and more are
coming on every day.
The technicians who manage most of the computers on campus --
Academic Computing and Network Services (ACNS) -- say they have about 18,500
accounts; approximately 15,000 are student accounts and 3500 are faculty or
staff. But that's not everybody who's on line. Departments such as meteorology,
math and engineering offer their own accounts.
And to keep pace with the burgeoning off-campus student demand for Internet
access, ACNS has been busy adding phone lines, from 80 last spring to 160 in the
summer to 180 in October and 300 projected for this spring.
When all the lines and software are installed and all the students are
hooked up, what do they do with it?
Two of the most popular Internet uses are the World Wide Web, a
collection of more than 100 million electronic pages of searchable information,
and the electronic postal system known as "e-mail."
Consider the case of communication doctoral student Daryl Weisman, who
landed at FSU last fall dazed and confused about the Web. Yet within a few weeks
he was a regular cybernaut.
"When it was confirmed that I was indeed 'surfing the web,' I had arrived,"
he said. "I was one of them."
With his free account, Weisman visits Web-sites to check the weather in
his hometown of Cincinnati, where his wife and daughter still live. He also
checks stock quotes and the daily news, and finds himself "in front of my
computer longer and longer each night, using the Internet as both a tool and a
toy."
For most students, professors, and even the university president, e-mail
is valuable in and out of the classroom.
"E-mail is a great way for me to receive messages from students, contact
deans and professors and keep up with a friend in Kenya," said D'Alemberte.
"Students now can ask questions that they had not thought of in class, and they
can get together in discussion groups to share their thoughts."
While doctoral student Sydne Kasle admits "computers scare me to death,"
e-mail of the free-access kind surely helps ease the fright. Kasle said she uses
e-mail "for those urgent messages," to stay in touch with friends and family in
far-away places and to "get feedback and help regarding the perils of graduate
school."
E-mail also has expanded the classroom beyond the buildings and chairs of
the physical world.
Dr. C. Edward Wotring of the Department of Communication teaches a
research-methods course that is one of the growing number at FSU that require all
students to use e-mail.
Professors like Wotring are putting coursework material on web sites instead
of passing out reams of photocopied handouts, and students are dialing in to
search the Web for research rather than pacing the library's book-lined halls.
Students also use e-mail to swap articles on their research interests.
Sean Connors, a senior in media production from Pensacola, said he uses the
web to find almost anything he wants.
"One day, I could be touring the Smithsonian, and the next day, I could
check out NASA," he said. "Its amazing the amount of information that is right at
your fingertips. The Internet has also allowed me find friends that I knew while
living in Spain and had lost contact with."
Heather Fitz, a public relations major from Brandon, Fla. used the web
to plan her move to California after her graduation.
"Because I can't afford to fly out there right now and check out
apartments," she said last fall, "I am using the Internet to do some of my
initial legwork.
"I have found many apartment listings ... and have been able to figure
out the average price ranges of apartments in various areas in L.A. I have also
been able to see what they look like thanks to a photograph scanner. I copied
down the phone numbers of the places in my price range and had them send me the
information I needed."
Still, not all the changes wrought by e-mail have been good. For one, it's
perhaps robbed students of the age-old "I'm too busy studying" excuse for not
writing home more often. And, as Shane Fisher, a business communications senior
from Homestead, observes disappointedly, "my parents can't send care packages via
e-mail."
Although FSU's arrival on the information superhighway has already
changed campus life, the long-term implications are far from clear.
"The whole presence of the Internet opens the world of knowledge into
people's own homes," said education professor Jan Flake."It is my opinion that
Internet holds the potential of radically changing the whole way we think about
education."
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