Petition to abolish tablet requirement

This is a crowdsourced petition, meaning anyone that has access to this can help compile (pour hate and trash the requirement) it.

Dissatisfaction with requirement

Inferior hardware

• Available models are limited to a 13.3" maximum screen size
• Tablets can not be upgraded nearly as extensively as full-scale laptops. Lenovo tablets support a maximum 320GB hard drive, and are limited to a dual-core i7 2620M.
• Keyboards are often cramped and do not include numpads.

Lack of real benefits

Virginia Tech has produced a list of purported benefits of tablet technology. With the possible exception of diagramming, we do not find any of them valid advantages over full-size laptops. Additionally, none of them can possibly justify requiring thousands of students to buy specialized hardware and software.

• "Writing on slides" - This can be done with text rather than handwriting. Most people can type significantly faster than write, and text annotations have the advantage of being more legible than handwriting.
• "Handwriting recognition" - This technology is nowhere near perfect, and operates disasterously when writing mathematical formulae by hand
• "Formulas and equations" - After learning LaTeX or the keyboard shortcuts for OneNote's equation editor, most equations can be typed faster than written.
• "Collaboration" - While this idea works well in environments where each user is running OneNote on a Windows tablet, you can no longer expect this type of compliance as many users have switched to Unix-based operating systems. Wikis and Google Docs, among other services, permit cross-platform users to collaborate.
• "Typing" is in no way restricted to tablets; in fact, one cannot even type on a tablet while the screen is flipped in tablet mode

Lack of choice

• Tablets are expensive compared to other laptops of similar specs, forcing students to pay extra for functionality they may rarely use.
• Students can't use Macbooks, as they lack tablet functionality.
• All available tablets are pre-installed with Windows, forcing students to buy an individual Windows license in addition to a VT Windows site license.
• Because the Engineering Education department assumes students have a tablet PC, they mandate installation of Windows-only software. DyKnow, for example, is an invasive classroom presentation tool with spyware capabilities, enabling lecturers to remotely control students' computers.

Proposed alternatives

• External tablets which can be connected to any standard laptop are readily available and cost less than $100.
• If tablets were optional, students could purchase the technology they find optimal for them, rather than be forced to use a certain platform.

Signatures of students not happy with the tablet requirement

• Lukas Lozovski
• George Burgess
• Matt Hazinski
• Randy Nance
• Ben Guzzardi
• Darren Maczka

Other unhappy people

• Free Culture at VT