CREDIT: JESSICA EDEN
Fanshawe student Garett MacLaren

When Garett MacLaren, a second year student in interactive media design and production at the Centre for Digital and Performance Arts (CDPA), discovered that the Mac computers had recently been replaced with PCs, he decided to do something about it.

The Mac computer lab, one of four labs on campus that originally contained approximately 40 Macs, was replaced with PCs at the beginning of September.

Rob Carver, Chair of the School of Contemporary Media, explained that one of the reasons for this change was due to the video game design and development program requiring more computer space.

“We initially thought that [the video game design and development program] would probably be a program that would start off with a single section intake of somewhere around 35 to 40 students. The demand for that program was so high that by the time we actually launched it, it had 160 students with four sections of 40,” Carver said.

Another reason that contributed was that despite being able to run PC software on a Mac platform, it caused malfunctions.

“All of the co-ordinators of the programs, myself, and the program manager were all involved in reviewing the situation and we determined at that time that in order to meet the needs of the video game program, we would need to have all of those programs run on PC,” Carver said.

Carver stated that at the time, there was no reason to believe that there would be complications as a result of the implementation of PCs.

However, the removal of the Macs resulted in a software that is used in 3D animation classes, which according to MacLaren in the description of his petition “ran beautifully on the Macs”, to crash within five minutes of opening it on a PC.

“I was perturbed by how this was going down and the decision of why it happened… I just felt it was not right,” MacLaren said.

Some of the main concerns for MacLaren were the effect it would have on his learning and future job prospects.

“When we finish our program we're going into this industry and they want to ensure that their students are proficient on Mac. It's industry standard,” MacLaren said. “Personally I have my own Mac computer that I use but I know a few friends of mine in the class don't have Macs. They rely on what's provided at Fanshawe.”

He described the decision to remove the Macs as “unjust” and wanted to do something about it, and so by approximately noon on Friday, Sept. 30, he had created and published an online petition called “Bring Back the Macs”.

“Change.org is a great avenue to go down in terms of getting a message out there. It's definitely easy for people to access and to get their voice heard,” MacLaren said.

He then sent the petition out to not only faculty members and all of the 120 students in his program, but also to agencies in the industry in and around London.

“They all came back to me with pretty lively responses like ‘this should be a non-issue'…they weren't impressed,” MacLaren said. “I even had one guy come back to me and say… this should be readdressed and Fanshawe needs to get their game together.”

Carver said when concerns were being raised by students and faculty at the beginning of the school year, he decided to investigate the nature of the concerns and to what extent course objectives and student satisfaction could be met.

“I was aware of the petition and that was something I was watching very closely as well as looking at the advice that was there from students and also from industry voices about the importance of Macs,” Carver said.

Late last week a meeting was held to review the situation.

“What we discovered was that if we did a little rejigging, we could in fact…take the PCs out and put Macintoshes that we already owned into that room,” Carver said.

Computer lab space was also expanded to accommodate an extra lab in addition to the original four.

MacLaren said that he was notified on Friday, Oct. 7 that the Macs were being reinstalled over the Thanksgiving weekend and believes all of the attention it was given and the support of 87 online signatures helped make it possible.

“I'd like this to be kind of a lesson to other students too, is if you see something you don't like you can change it. There is power in numbers,” MacLaren said.

Carver said that he thought the petition was “very professional” and that the positions stated in it were “well-reasoned”.

“I really appreciate that our students took some action to let us know how important they thought this issue was. I'm just really glad we were able to come to a solution which is going to be able to give everybody the access they need for software for the remainder of the year,” Carver said.