One Laptop Per PhD Student

robyn.owens — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:56:00 GMT

I was at a national meeting this week where we discussed, among other things, aspirations for high quality facilities for PhD students. I made the suggestion that we (the University) should supply a new laptop on enrolment for all PhD students. This suggestion was met with gasps of horror from colleagues at other universities, somewhat to my surprise. It was clearly something that seemed way out of the realms of dreaming, and then shortly afterwards the arguments about why it would be a bad thing started.

Using laptops is bad for your health
Laptops get stolen
Laptops require back-up
Laptops would require set-up with necessary software
Licencing for software would be complicated/costly
What happens if the student takes longer than 4 years? - should the laptop be replaced?
Who owns the laptop at the end of candidature?

I know, however, that a number of Schools at UWA do supply their PhD students with a new computer (desktop or laptop, whichever is more appropriate or desired) upon commencement. This seems to me perfectly reasonable - I can't imagine how one could be expected to do a PhD without a computer, and if the research requires travel and/or fieldwork, then a laptop is necessary.

Is the One Laptop Per PhD Student an even wilder dream than the One Laptop Per Child?

eResearch

robyn.owens — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 07:13:00 GMT

I've just spent the past two days in Brisbane at a conference on eResearch. Now I'm feeling really inspired about lots of eResearch technologies that we can set up for research students. There were some really great keynotes at this conference: Phil Bourne from San Diego was fantastic about his vision for the near future (the vision he is in fact creating for and with his grad students). Phil's a crystallographer, but eResearch is at the core of new developments in protein crystallography. He described a new mode of publishing where the annotated text is accompanied by data and an annotated YouTube video from the author, all available on-line to the public (free access). The annotation means that the text, the video, and the data are all searchable, and the data are published and usable by others, just like the ideas are. (Hmm ... interesting cinematographic training possibilities for grad students here.)

Alex Szalay, from Johns Hopkins University, gave a great talk on mapping the universe (why not?). And Rudolf Dimper got us all excited about the research being carried out at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble. I particularly liked their non-destructive imaging of a fossil egg, containing possibly the world's smallest dinosaur (there is one PhD student currently trying to put the tiny little bone fragments together - all virtually, of course).

From the Humanities perspective, I was impressed by the work of Ian Johnson at the Archaeological Computing Laboratory at the University of Sydney. They've developed a great tool called HeuristScholar as a collaborative knowledge space in the humanities. The new version is about to be released in 2 weeks' time, so check it out then.

In the Qantas Club and on my way home ... hope the enthusiasm lasts.

Robyn's Blog : eResearch

One Laptop Per PhD Student

eResearch