Original_To:  BITNET%"mbu-l@ttuvm1.bitnet"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Thu, 1 Oct 1992 06:53:00 EDT
From:         "Composition Digest (Robert Royar,
              Moderator)" <R0MILL01@ULKYVX.BITNET>
Subject:      Idaho Changes (4)

Date:         Sun, 27 Sep 1992 10:39:54 EDT
From:         IN%"RobertRoyar@Delphi.com" Robert Royar (C&CD Moderator)
Message-id:   <1992Sep27.103954.1.Grendel.Lair@Cratylus>
Subject:      Idaho Changes (4)
              <01GP94KFMFF48ZDW2K@ulkyvx.bitnet>
Reply-to:     IN%"R0MILL01@ULKYVX.LOUISVILLE.EDU"  C&CD
Organization: Cratylus Educational Software

Gordon Thomas <ENGLAB@IDUI1.BITNET> asks for advice on what happens when
other departments decide to use the English computer labs.  Our NYIT
experience is similar to Gordon's although his old labs are better equipped
than are our new ones, and the price he quotes of $200,000.00 for
 > a 60-station Novell network consisting of 486 33-MgHz
 > PCs, backup up by a Unix workstation capable of handling mail accounts
 > for approximately 3000 people.
is far below what we've been told are costs on the East coast for lesser set
ups (where do you buy your equipment, Gordon?).  But still when I came to
NYIT in 1988 the English department was just turning its labs over to the
entire school and turning the management over to the computer services
department. The consesnsus is that we may have given up more than we
gained--but we did get better and more machines and went from using the labs
for only a few classes to using them for all classes.

I believe that the ones who are saying we have lost (here) are those who
were part of the pilot project and had previously had the labs all to
themselves with full-time lab support.  Now that we've gone from a dozen
classes a semester per lab to over 70, the labs break down more often and
there are more complaints.  No one seems to have forseen the possibility
that the pilot was too small to test for the eventual usage level.
Additionally, there have been rumblings from departments over not getting
time in the labs because English has them "tied up", but the times when the
labs are idle are also not being taken up by other departments, and
training for programs other than word processing has been sparsely attended
by non-English faculty.  Our sense is that students in other departments
are asking why their courses are not on the computer, and either the
departments or the room schedulers have found it easier to blame us than to
rearrange schedules to fit the lab times (something we had to do four
years ago).

My point is you could see a lot of smoke from other departments about
wanting to use the labs but maybe little fire.  They may not have the
pedagogy in place to work in the labs anyway.  The other department using
computers heavilly here is business, and they have their own lab equipped
with the computers from the original pilot project. Of course I'm ignoring
departments that have always had computers (although not on LANs) such as
Computer Graphics, Computer Sciences, and MIS. They too have their own
facilities which support specialized software (and hardware) not applicable
to most other departments' needs.

The requests for time here have come from engineering departments which had
not used computers in the past, from liberal arts programs, from
Communication Arts and Architecture.  The two latter programs (CA and Arch)
are special cases in that they require specialized software for scripting,
scheduling, video toasting, and architectural design which outstrip our
currently aging LAN and hardware.  In fact, one of the complaints from
other departments are our hardware choices.  We had a difficult time
convincing much of the rest of the school to install a LAN in the first
place.  Now, they come back at us saying we should have bought higher
capacity computers and a better (more expensive) LAN system.  So that too
is a potential problem--departments first arguing you are spending too much
(because they are short sighted) and then themselves discovering their
penny pinching locked them out.  (Again, here CA and Arch were not part of
the penney pinching, but a number of Engineering and Liberal Arts
departments were.)

There are other problems we experienced as a result of budget lines moving
from English to the computer support department.  We might have liked more
to have been budgeted for personnel to support the labs in class use--to
handle breakdowns immediately so classes scheduled in the labs would not be
lost. But computer service department budgets have so many more lines
devoted to support and such a hierarchy that the personnel I'm describing
may be a low priority.  A case in point was that I was hired here in Spring
1988 when the English department controlled the lab personnel.  I was hired
(by the chair and future dean) as the LAN manager and given released time
for that position (the primary reason I came).  But by the time the
position began in September 1988, internal politics, powerplays over
staffing and budget, even deals over classroom and office furniture led the
department to relinquish control of lab personnel, and my position
dissappeared.  It was eventually taken over by a part-time manager who was
also a student.

So, there are anumber of problems that can arise when English labs go
public, at least from my experience.  Looking back on the last four years,
I'd say if we could have forseen these problems we could have made a
transition that would not have led to some of the political infighting and
mistrust that has arisen in part because of who controls (or fails to
control) the NYIT computer labs.

 -- Robert Royar (RobertRoyar@Delphi.com) New York Institute of Technology
    "Do not search for the truth. Simply cease to cherish opinion"
                                           - Sengstan, Third Zen Patriarch

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