How does a department, organization, institution provide support for the growing variety of available software, hardware, and networked solutions with the no additional staffing? It’s no secret, hiring “enough” support staff isn’t possible.\u00a0 Aside from being fiscally impossible, it’s probably impractical – there are just too many needs.<\/p>\n
We all have our favorite operating system, web browser, word processor, collaboration solution, etc.\u00a0 Personally, I like the Macintosh operating system.\u00a0 I use Firefox web browser and Microsoft Word as a word processor.\u00a0 I prefer a Wiki over Sharepoint.\u00a0 Others like Linux, Open Office, Google Web, and Google Docs.<\/p>\n
So, how can we support this diversity?\u00a0 The above examples are fairly trivial.\u00a0 We should continue to provide full support for key, institutional, mission critical technology.\u00a0 But when it comes to providing support for specialized software or hardware, the challenges become more complicated and diverse.<\/p>\n
One way to do provide “support” is through the community.\u00a0 In the “old days” this was done through special interest groups – “SIGS.”\u00a0 The problem with SIGS was that most of the interaction was through group meetings, on a monthly basis. Over time, the interest usually waned and the topics could become irrelevant to the vast majority.\u00a0 Today, technology can make it possible for any us to reach out for support 24×7 and receive relevant help through the community of interested users – all through the use of Discussion Forum technology.<\/p>\n
I’m a member of several forums related to audio\/music engineering. I used them a lot when I first opened my recording studio back in 2001.\u00a0 These forums have threads on many topics with lots of good information.\u00a0 Before I asked a question, I searched the forum to see if my question had ever been asked before.\u00a0 If so, I had my answer.\u00a0 If not, I would post my question, within a day or so, if not sooner, someone posted an answer.\u00a0 What’s cool is that some questions got lots answers from various perspectives – many who contributed were from world renown audio engineers who had been in the business for 30 years.\u00a0 Rarely, did I not get what I needed.\u00a0 Some of the forums had threads were 3 or 4 years old that still provided value.\u00a0 I got an email message every time a new post was added to a thread that I participated in or started.\u00a0 In fact, I recently got an email message a couple weeks ago when someone posted on a thread that I participated in four years ago.<\/p>\n
We can setup discussion forums with subject matter experts as forum moderators.\u00a0 Forum topics can be technologies like: Final Cut Pro; Using Google Docs; Effective Ways of Using a Wiki in Teaching; Macintosh Snow Leopard; Podcasting; Creating Multimedia; Using SPSS\/SAS, and many others.\u00a0 Such a service can enable a student with a question about SPSS to post their question to the the forum; someone within the Northeastern community can provide an answer.\u00a0 The thread is persistent and can probably help another student months and even years later.<\/p>\n
Can we support the unsupportable?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 We just need to be creative and willing to find ways to make sure that our faculty and students can get what they need – without them having to be technical wizards.\u00a0 There’s a lot of knowledge out there that can be tapped into – we just need to provide “the forum” for them to share that knowledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More with less (or at least the same). How does a department, organization, institution provide support for the growing variety of available software, hardware, and networked solutions with the no additional staffing? It’s no secret, hiring “enough” support staff isn’t possible.\u00a0 Aside from being fiscally impossible, it’s probably impractical – there are just too many…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,7,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markallenstaples.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markallenstaples.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markallenstaples.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markallenstaples.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markallenstaples.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.markallenstaples.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markallenstaples.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markallenstaples.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markallenstaples.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}