panel -
71 Living on the Bleeding Edge: Creating and Managing Highly Specialized Student Labs
Deborah
Cherry, Carnegie Mellon University
Pomona Valero, Carnegie Mellon University
Paul Phillabaum, UCLA Center for Digital Arts
As use of technology increases in the curriculum, more
faculty want to use increasingly specialized hardware and software to meet
their educational goals and keep their students on the leading edge of the
technology used in their fields. The support needs of these highly specialized
uses are usually well beyond those of general labs that central computing
groups maintain. Many individual academic departments do not have the expertise
or resources to maintain lab facilities for a large number of users. Especially
in the growing multimedia field, multiple departments may have similar or
overlapping needs, making single department facilities an inefficient use of
resources.
This panel will explore the support models being used
at several universities to create and support these highly specialized
facilities that are used by large and varied student communities. Although the
facilities presented are multimedia based, many of the issues are the same for
any facility designed to meet highly specialized needs. Lab managers and
faculty support personnel considering or in the process of supporting
specialized facilities will be interested in exploring these issues and the
lessons learned along the way by the panelists.
The three support models observed are based on the groups responsible for maintaining the facility: Central Computing Group, one or more Academic Department(s), and a hybrid of the two, where both the central computing group and the academic department(s) are jointly responsible for maintaining the facility. In many cases the support model created was an entirely new entity or required making major adaptations to existing support models. The success of these facilities required integrating the support model into the existing university culture, in addition to overcoming problems with technology that was often not well suited to lab environments and novice users.