I read the article on early adopters of campus-wide laptops (I have one 
myself and used it all summer doing the very things cited in the article: 
word processing and email at Columbia University), but I still prefer my 
larger keyboard and screen at home and here in the office when I am not 
mobile. Equity seems to be a big issue, but students will pay for either 
labs or laptops through technology fees, although perhaps we can fob off 
some of the cost better with laptops.

I have been reading -- in preparation for the upcoming UT Board Meeting -- 
a new book (borrowed from Vanderbilt of course, research institution UTC 
does not own this book) edited by Richard Hersh and John Merrow, entitled, 
Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk, and a chapter called "Six 
Challenges to the American University" by Vartan Gregorian, former 
President of Brown University and current President of the Carnegie 
Corporation of New York has this to say:

"...the university clearly has its work cut out for itself: to reinvent 
itself in the cyberage. Already we are deluged with puzzling questions. Are 
faculty members to be reduced to the role of "facilitators" and "Content 
Providers?

....Our first big challenge is how to transform undigested data and 
information into structures, integrated knowledge and make that knowledge 
widely available....the new technologies, a primary cause of the info-glut, 
also offer promising opportunities to create, integrate, and disseminate 
knowledge.

....University faculty also must recognize that the info-glut and the 
fragmentation of knowledge call for reorganizing the curriculum to create 
more coherence and more strength in the liberal arts, especially by 
renewing the centrality and interaction of sciences, humanities, social 
studies, and arts....Higher education, of course, is not just "hire" 
education, as in job training."

It is the software, including faculty, that make the university, not the 
classrooms or laptops. Adopt technology when appropriate; do not 
appropriate technology just because it is there.

Richard