Imagine you wake up late and have a paper due at the start of class, but you don’t have a printer in your room. Heading to a SINC site at this time would be pointless because most are full throughout the day. So what do you do?
Stony Brook University is testing a brand new service called, “Print From Anywhere” that would allow students to print their last minute documents from their dorms or laptops at all of the SINC sites on campus via a wireless connection.
The program uses the Residential Network or Airnet, the wireless connection available on the Academic Mall. People can use Print From Anywhere to send a document from their computers directly to a PHAROS release station in any SINC site.
The print job remains in the print queue for 24 hours. At any point during this time, students can log on as they would when using a SINC site computer to find their document in the queue.
The program is a project of the Teaching, Learning and Technology Lab in the Main Library.
Matthew Froehlich, manager of instructional computing at the lab, said the new program will “turn the whole campus into a SINC site.”
The program has not been officially launched, however, because “it’s new, and we are working out the kinks,” Froehlich said.
“When you do something new in this environment, it’s got to be perfect,” he said. “If not, it’s going to be a disaster.”
The university’s Print From Anywhere homepage says, “There is no guarantee that your job will be released successfully.” It recommends having the document easily accessible, either on the Internet or a USB drive.
The increase in print load is not an issue, Froehlich said, because the printers are all under warranty from the printer company.
Because the program is still in beta testing, the Teaching, Learning and Technology Lab encourages student input, and has set up a link at http://tlt.stonybrook.edu/printfromanywhere. The link describes all the steps necessary to try the program, including Airnet files that students may download directly to their computer. Students may also go to the main library SINC site and talk to any of the student consultants about how to get started.
When asked about the program for this article, student consultants declined to comment because they weren’t authorized to speak to reporters.
“The only worry,” Froehlich said, “is that there won’t be enough printers.”
