Drawing from the results of the 2007 Student Computing Survey released Tuesday, the UW-Madison Division of Information Technology is making improvements to keep computing safe and effective at the university.
A random sample of 1,246 UW-Madison undergraduate, graduate, professional and special students were invited by e-mail to participate. Among these, 356 people responded.
According to Brian Rust, senior administration program specialist at DoIT, UW-Madison is almost always in the lead"" in terms of the quality and quantity of services offered at peer institutions. He said services like MyWebSpace and WiscCal do not exist at many campuses.
More wireless locations and a faster campus network were the top technologies students wanted on campus as indicated in the survey. As of early summer, 80 percent of campus now has wireless coverage. This number is up from 30 percent one year ago, Rust said.
DoIT plans to work to improve the speed of the network in the near future, as well as ensure that campus computers can handle simultaneous connections without losing signal strength.
According to Rust, the university must keep up with technology because of the constant influx of students who are becoming used to it at a younger age ""both in and out of the classroom.""
""Students are expecting and are using more portable devices,"" he said. ""They want more versatility in terms of being able to connect and more storage.""
One change DoIT made to the system last week was doubling the available storage for messages on WiscMail to 200 megabytes.
However, Rust said there is a team looking into whether UW-Madison should switch to a mail service offering unlimited space for messages, like G-mail, Yahoo or MSN.
According to Rust, Arizona State University switched to G-mail last year, but Google lost several student accounts as a result of the change, which ""would not be tolerated here.""
