Comparing Computer Usage by Students in Education Programs to Technology Education Majors

The 1990s have been an era of growth in computer usage for campuses across the United States. A national survey of information technology use in higher education indicated an increasing integration of computing related activities into college courses (Campus Computing Project, 2000). This survey reported that three-fifths of undergraduate courses utilized electronic mail and two-fifths made use of World Wide Web (WWW) resources. Parallel to this trend is the growing number of colleges and universities instituting requirements for student computer ownership (“Growing number of colleges require...,” 2000). This article reported that many of the schools implementing the requirement did so to guarantee that all students had access to the same computing resources. Research by Brown (1999) indicated that at schools without a computer ownership requirement, only half the students are likely to own one.