I also remember going to the library and having to look up references, scan the pages or write the notes down, write the paper on Windows ’95, and then save it to a floppy disk to submit. We did not have the internet until I was in the 7th grade and even then, I basically blew up my parents’ computer with AIM and still had to go to the library all through high school to write papers and such (funnily enough, my classmates and I recently had a good laugh about this).
Anyways, I enjoyed your comments on the infrastructure universities need in order to meet the demands of the students. I remember my freshman year of college, waiting up at 6 AM to register for classes and the internet literally BROKE because it did not have the capacity to handle all of the students trying o accomplish the same task simultaneously. This was about a year or so after they started offering campus-wide WiFi and the infrastructure simply wasn’t caught up. Since then they have made significant changes to their structure.
With the growing realm of online education, it is interesting to think if it is even possible to have the kind of infrastructure to sustain this growth or if we need to look at how to invest and improve upon the technology we have.
