Martin W. Dubetz, Ph.D., director of Academic Computing and Networking, oversees the center and anticipates the facility will have a much broader dimension in the coming months and years. The biggest need is simply word processing. We loaded them on the day they hit the market because they solved networking problems for us. Students want to keep in touch with their colleagues all over the world and with their families. There's a large social component to the center, as well.
People can visit and chat, learn from each other.
The Arts and Sciences Computing Center has distributed almost 10,000 e-mail accounts to the college's students and faculty. Forty students assist Dubetz and the three managers. So far, students have taken more advantage of the center than faculty, said Dubetz, although he noted that faculty are learning more about the facility and are finding ways of incorporating a resource such as the Internet into their curricula. We need to talk to faculty and find out what kind of computing they need, look at what's already available to them, help them select software and computers, then hook them up to the campus network. They have outstanding home pages and great resources available.