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Ten years have seen technology take a prominent role in the classroom at Georgetown.

TEN YEARS AGO, on-campus computer labs were often packed with students, many of whom did not own laptops. In the age of Y2K, e-mail was a relatively new concept for many undergraduates. Blackboard was used by only a few professors – hardly widely embraced.

Times have changed. Today, students type class notes on laptops, download podcasts of lectures and use clickers to answer professors’ questions during class.

While the state of technology on campus today has changed drastically over the past decade, Georgetown has struggled to keep pace with rapid advances in the field, to the chagrin of many students.

The university took a major step forward on Aug. 25 of this year when it unveiled the Hoyamail e-mail system, which is provided by Google Apps for Education and makes available thousands of megabytes of storage space per account.

Hoyamail replaced the antiquated GUMail system, which students and faculty in the College, School of Foreign Service and School of Nursing and Health Studies had used since 1999. GUMail accounts were limited to 20 megabytes of storage space, and the system suffered from multiple outages and spam attacks over its 10-year lifetime.

Students welcomed the change, but the path to Hoyamail was marred by frustrations that some complained have become all too typical. Beth Ann Bergsmark, then director of University Information Services, told The Hoya in October 2006 that UIS hoped to revamp GUMail by the end of 2007. In October 2008, the timetable was pushed back to spring 2009. In the fall of 2008, UIS increased faculty and staff GUMail account sizes to 256 megabytes, leaving students’ unchanged at 20 megabytes.

By the time Hoyamail was released, Google Apps was 3 years old and already used by thousands of educational institutions on six continents. Most Georgetown students had resorted to forwarding their mail to personal accounts because the 20-megabyte GUMail accounts were simply too small.

Some of the university’s other technological initiatives also have been plagued by difficulties. While many universities provide wireless Internet access across their entire campuses, Georgetown has built a patchwork system of hot spots across campus over the past decade, and many residence halls and apartment complexes lack wireless access. Bergsmark, currently UIS senior director, recognized that Georgetown lags behind its peer institutions when it comes to wireless technology.

“Definitely in terms of wireless we’re very vulnerable [in] the fact that we don’t have our residence halls covered, and we don’t have our academic buildings covered. . I think that we are aware of that,” she told The Hoya in October.

The university plans to eventually make the entire main campus wireless-accessible, but a lack of funds stands in the way.

“We’re waiting for funding, so we basically have everything stocked up and ready to go,” Bergsmark said in October. “Our network upgrade plans, should funds become available, focus on accelerating the residence halls first as one of the areas with the greatest need.”

When the university upgraded its information management system earlier this year, replacing Access+ with MyAccess, some felt students were inconvenienced. Course registration became a more cumbersome process – The Hoya’s editorial board described the new system as “clumsy, confusing and difficult to manage.”

Perhaps the most damaging technology-related mishap of the decade came on Jan. 3, 2008, when a hard drive containing the Social Security numbers of 38,000 students, alumni, faculty and staff was stolen from the office of then-Senior Business Manager for Student Affairs Lynne Hirschfeld. The hard drive was not encrypted, and though the university established a task force to examine ways to enhance data security after the incident, for many the effort was too little, too late.

Bergsmark acknowledged that UIS has spent the last 10 years playing from behind in many respects.

“There was a lot of `catch up’ to do over the past 10 years to stabilize, build or replacement core systems,” she said.

Today, the department does not have the funding to accomplish everything on its wish list, so it is forced to prioritize, Bergsmark said.

Despite the struggles of UIS, Bergsmark said that technology at Georgetown has come a long way since 1999.

“10 years ago, we were teaching students what e-mail was and showing them how to use their first e-mail account,” she said.

Bergsmark noted that UIS has made several concrete strides over the past decade.

“Over the past 10 years, we have replaced faculty and staff computers on several cycles, built out technology in the classrooms, replaced the student information system, built faculty and staff secure file services, built and moved to a new data center, built out the Web environment and encouraged every department to have a Web presence, built two e-mail systems and recently moved the students to Gmail, expanded our computational research capabilities, and delivered new or enhanced existing enterprise level applications for areas across the university,” she said.

While she admitted that Georgetown is not as technologically advanced as other universities, she said that the university has been on the cutting edge of some areas.

“Our video conferencing immersion room allows students at the D.C. campus to attend a course with students in Qatar,” she said. “We are one of the few universities with this capability that is key to connecting our global campuses.”

In a decade marked by the advent of the laptop, iPod and smart phone, Georgetown has made steady – if often slow – progress in its efforts to keep up with the pace set by technological discovery and free enterprise.

When asked about what UIS hopes to improve on in the years ahead, Bergsmark said she hopes to establish a regularly funded construction and maintenance schedule for the wireless network and other “critical services.”

“We also believe that technology tools [that] enhance the learning environment will be critical to our global initiatives and academic continuity goals and plan to continue focusing on these capabilities,” she said.

*Caitlin Gilbert contributed to this report.*”