two items I stumbled across are both interesting and troubling. First, the University of Virginia, citing 99% laptop ownership among its students, is closing down their computer labs over three years to cut costs:

http://www.metafilter.com/80409/Rethinking-the-higher-education-computer-lab-at-U-of-VA

And in other news, the venerable Networked Writing Environment closed down last summer. I never used it, but over the years I've kept stumbling across it and reading references to it. It seems like a lot of good scholars worked in that lab and now it is gone as well:

http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/writing/closing/

I feel really fortunate that our two labs are student-funded, but I also have noted that increasingly more laptops are showing up in class. These issues have cropped up on Techrhet repeatedly over the years, of course. Perhaps the economic climate is accelerating certain changes to the technological context of writing instruction.

snippet on time travel from Lost