第一篇 Passage 1

Dropping the Line

College sophomore Dana Boulter had time to kill one sunny afternoon. So she spread out a blanket under a maple tree, turned on laptop computer and started surfing the Web. No messy wiring is required.

Here at Greenville College, as at a growing number of campuses, students can log on from almost anywhere ----- outdoors, in classrooms, in the basketball stands.

“It’s so nice here,” said Boulter, of Lincoln, Neb., checking stock quotes for an economics assignment. “I’m not confined in my campus.”

Laptop computers connected to wireless networks give students ultimate mobility: They can check e-mail, chat with friends and otherwise stay on the Net while they roam about campus.

“Students are the only group of people on college campuses who don’t have their own office,” said Richard Ridgeway, communications director at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. “Notebook computers make anywhere they are their office.”

Buena Vista, Drexel and Wake Forest are among the universities that began campus-wide wireless service this fall. Greenville started its program a year ago, as did Carnegie Mellon University. Mount St. Mary College in Newburgh, N. Y., introduced a slower form of wireless service in 1996.

Sure, the technology has drawbacks: the potential for greater security risks and congestion. Plus, laptop batteries last only a few hours, and students can goof off more easily in class.

But wireless networks also let students collaborate more naturally. And schools do not have to install access ports anywhere a student might conceivably want to work.

The technology is still cutting-edge at colleges and universities, which already tend to be leaders in Internet usage.

No one keeps figures. But Tony Mordosky, past president of the Association of Telecommunications Professionals in Higher Education, estimates that less than 5 percent of campuses are fully wireless.

Mordosky expects a wireless explosion in the next two to five years, similar to the growth of high-speed wiring in dormitories during the mid-1990s.

Scores of schools are already testing wireless technology or equipping specific buildings to supplement their traditional wired networks. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln recently equipped its student union. Business schools at Purdue and Vanderbilt went wireless over the past year, and the University of Kansas’s law school will do so soon.

The impetus: improvements in wireless speeds and reductions in prices in the past year or so.

A small college can now set up an entire campus for a few hundred thousand dollars—far less than the cost of upgrading older buildings or extending wiring to every classroom desk. Larger schools can do so for a few million dollars.

At Mount St. Mary, computer modems had been swamping the college’s phone network, but wiring dormitories with dedicated Net connections would have cost $150,000. The wireless route cost $30,000.

Greenville also found going wireless cheaper than extending wires to dormitory rooms located blocks away from campus. To cover the entire 26-acre campus except for one parking lot and some remote athletic fields, technicians installed 60 access boxes along the walls or ceilings. Those boxes are slightly bigger than a smoke detector, with one or two antennae the size of a pen.

A laptop-toting student who wants to connect can buy a wireless card for about $450 a semester.

When a student is within range, the laptop automatically connects with a nearby access point, sending and receiving Internet traffic at up to 11 megabits per second, or 200 times faster than speediest telephone modem. Traffic moves from that access point to central servers through regular wiring.

About half of Greenville’s 940 undergraduates have signed up. Though only a handful of schools across the country now issue or require laptops, Greenville will begin requiring them for incoming freshmen next year.

Greenville College President James Mannoia routinely listens to Brazilian newscasts through the Web as he strolls to his office carrying his laptop.

Some evenings, laptops light the main quad outdoors like giant fireflies.

Eric Weidmann, a freshman from Fridley, Minn., brought his laptop to the cafeteria one afternoon to download music files.

“What you do on the computer doesn’t always require a lot of thinking,” he said. “Now, I can talk to people without being in my room by myself.”

Michael Dixon’s classes are scattered throughout the day. During breaks, the sophomore is often in the snack bar, chatting online with his parents in Stockton, Calif., or even doing Web-aided homework.

During a class on computer basics, eight of 32 students surfed along on their laptops. One of them, senior B.J. Schneck liked the ability to go beyond the instructor’s demonstrations.

“It enhances the leaning experience,” Schneck said. “We were able to check on the same things he was working on as well as explore on our own.”

At Buena Vista, communications professor Paul Bowers had students collaborate in small groups to find online resources on political campaigns. Once professors tap into technology’s potential, he said, there “will be less lecturing and more students doing things on their own with teachers assisting them.”

But some students catch up on personal e-mail instead of paying attention.

Craig Boyd, a philosophy professor at Greenville, banned laptops last fall when he learned a student was checking baseball scores during class.

And unless all students have laptops, instructors cannot fully incorporate them into the curriculum. Buena Vista raised tuition about $1,000 a year, offset partly by financial aid, to buy wireless laptops for its1, 250 students. But where laptops are optional, are poorer students getting an equal education?

Wireless networks use frequencies separate from cell phones. They share an unregulated 2.4 Gigahertz frequency with microwave ovens, newer cordless phones and devices using an emerging Bluetooth standard. As wireless products get popular, interference could become a problem.

In the next few years, wireless networks will likely become commonplace at hotels, airport and some businesses, analysts say.

Wireless networking will become a $2.2 billion industry by 2003, nearly three times the $800 million this year, projects Stan Schatt, a vice president at Giga Information Group. This figure is on top of the business for cell phones.

课文词语 Words and Expressions from the Text

laptop 膝上电脑

quotes 报价

congestion 拥塞

ports 端口

goof off 打发时间

cutting-edge 创新；革新

impetus 推动力

antennae 天线

laptop-toting 背着手提电脑的学生

megabit 兆位

strolls 漫步

quad 院子

fireflies 萤火虫

offset 弥补，抵消

frequencies 频率

hertz 千兆赫

ovens 微波炉