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Comment by justaguitarist | Hacker News Reader

I'm a higher ed sysadmin and yes, yes they do. I have faculty that refuse to accept digital assignments and require their students to turn in their work by hand during office hours. I have other faculty that require every student to print out the assigned reading and bring it to class. I've been preaching for "green months" where I just turn off the print server but that's falling on deaf ears it seems like.

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Please read the other responses here and consider that maybe your colleagues have a better idea of what they need than you do.

Looks like I need to understand my users better.

Edit: holy crap, read all of the responses so far and I have some emails to send and thought processes to change. Thanks for helping me realize this.

If you really want to help your colleagues, make it as easy to print as humanly possible. ;-)

I don’t know how many times I’ve had to help older people I work with who are at the end of their chain trying to figure out how to simply print some document, work-related or otherwise. It should be plug and play but it usually isn’t. Technology is really not that intuitive for people who didn’t grow up with it, and what they need is frequently quite different than what “we” (digital natives, I guess) need. Accessibility’s a bitch!

Requiring students to print out assigned reading is ridiculous though. I'd also argue that they should print the assignments out themselves if they want a paper copy to use as opposed to making students do it, though I suppose that's also a budgetary thing (fob the costs onto the students, where it's spread out more).

Maybe so, but it isn't someone in IT's job to point this out.

I have a good relationship with my department's IT guy. If he started telling me how to run my classes, we'd have a much less good relationship all of a sudden.

Never said it was.

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