Thinking toward an inventory of instructional technology equipment
8 Feb 2001
I talked with Carole Bailey about existing data and procedures and
learned some vital facts:
-
University property tags are assigned to items that cost more than $500,
and are often attached to equipment bought with a purchase order; items
under $500 may or may not have property tags. The database of property
tags is in the keeping of University Services. Flash Floyd tells
me that the property tag database resides on Augusta (the Purchasing and
Asset module), and it may be possible to link Augusta and a prospective
Access database so that the latter will update when the former is changed.
In theory anything can be tagged, if the tagger thinks it's desirable,
and Flash would contribute a raft of tags for the purpose of extending
coverage.
-
Many of the Media Center items that fall within "instructional technology"
are in an Access database already
-
Equipment purchased by departments may 'roam', and be more or less precisely
located (viz: TV carts on the various floors of Newcomb, boom boxes owned
by the English department)
-
There is no census of the capabilities of all classroom spaces, though
elements of that exist (viz: Carole's census of the status of network connections
in the Science Center, Scott Dittman's knowledge of capacities and scheduling
of university classrooms)
What we have here is a classic case of need for a collaboration
to build the tool --a relational database-- that will connect up the known
bits, incorporate new bits when they are added, remove deleted bits when
they are retired, and enable us to ask and answer questions about what's
where, when and by whom it was purchased, who is responsible for support,
repair records, maybe even usage statistics, etc. Such a database is a
practical necessity to manage what we have and to make informed decisions
about what will be purchased, and it should be built right. The
collaborators will need to include at least the following:
-
UC people (John Hellmuth re: Augusta; Skip Williams re: NT server to house
the Access database that will use ASP to connect to a queryable Web interface),
-
Media Center people (to contribute existing data and gather new, and update
as new items are added) ,
-
University Services (since they manage a lot of the purchase and entry
of property tag data)
-
Registrar's Office (because many of the spaces are university classrooms)
-
Computer Science students to write the database application
What's needed to accomplish this design of a knows-all tells-all database?
Again, a classic collaboration problem: donated resources and time and
energy can't do it. People need to be assigned to tasks as part
of their jobs, and manpower has to be allocated to accomplish the data-gathering
and -entry, the writing of the code to connect existing bits and pipe results
to end users, and the testing and deployment of the completed project.
Much of it could be done during the summer with student labor (a talk with
Tom Whaley would be the first step in mobilizing that).
9 Feb
Carole tells me that Tom Contos is willing to fund part of the process
of amassing the necessary data (via student hours during the summer), since
he's been charged with the task of evaluating space and therefore needs
the same information we're after, including instructional technology. As
Carole noted, there are actually more constituencies who need this information
than we'd originally thought.