Column: Out with the old, in with the new

Princeton has taken some promising baby steps in integrating new technology into campus life. But sometimes, its tentative efforts to be on the cutting edge have been met with difficulty and disapproval.

The Kindle e-reader pilot program last semester replaced paper readings with the digital e-readers in three trial courses. After a semester, many students and professors criticized the Kindle as unsuited for classroom use.

But despite concerns about the program, the Kindle experiment brings to mind other opportunities to partner with technology companies. There are a number of relatively simple options — that don’t involve purchasing iPads en masse — that would help boost the University’s tech-savvy image while delivering real value to students and faculty.

The first change involves the technology most highly utilized in our daily lives: e-mail. The webmail service the University employs is a clunky interface that could easily be replaced with Gmail. The University of Virginia and George Washington University, among many others, have already adopted it, and Yale will soon switch over, too.

Not only is the interface lightyears ahead, but storage space with Gmail would no longer be a problem. And Gmail’s system of labels and filters — compared with the current system’s folders — is well suited to sort the influx of University e-mail. Gmail is easy to learn, powerful and well supported.

Blackboard offers another manageable front for improvement. Integrating a WordPress theme or a comparable blog platform into Blackboard would allow for more meaningful conversations. As it stands, commenting is limited to unformatted, plain-text responses. Attaching images or data, editing posts and replying to comments is difficult or impossible. But by integrating with WordPress, preceptors could easily design surveys, attach useful information and categorize posts by topic. Students would be treated with a seamless, visually pleasing system that would allow greater potential for real intellectual conversation.

All this being said, the University has made some positive steps in bringing the next generation of web technology to its students.

It has made accounts on Twitter and Facebook, though its presence there seems limited to basic announcements already available by e-mail.

LaundryView, an online application that shows which laundry machines are in use and for how long — and even offers text message alerts when your load is complete — is only available for 14 laundry rooms on campus.

Transloc, a live tracking system for on-campus shuttles, has integrated with a Google Maps view of campus. But Princeton’s own campus map hasn’t yet followed this lead, though it would benefit new students and visitors — especially if the University allowed Google Street View on campus.

Branching out into new territory, the University or the USG might consider a more holistic course ranking system that integrates seamlessly with the registrar’s offerings for the past 10 years. The USG’s Student Course Guide has been the staple fallback for students, but CourseRank — a new service first employed at Stanford — is now poised to offer more useful data. It incorporates data not only from anonymous ratings, but also from students’ grades, to create info-graphics and distribution charts.

It seems as though a lot of useful web technology has resulted from University partnerships with private-sector firms or student projects. Given the quality of services generated by such collaborations, a program to actively encourage further work would be invaluable.