I manage a brand new tiki powered website (started 08/03) for an applied art school computer department
Situation
The situation I and my three collegues are facing is the following:
- 60 PCs, 80 Macs, many softs, different printers (A4-A0), different cameras (analogic and digital) different scanners, different servers.
- We have a photography, earthwork and windowing department, with a total of 300 students, 30 teachers, 30 guest teachers.
- People working in and out of school (photographers, for example…).
Why an educational portal ?
- the amount of different tools and ways of doing makes it impossible for everybody to know everyting.
- many classes are project-based in a very free-form: students have to plan their workflow and be aware of the technical aspects of it.
- each year, about 100 students leave the school, taking along the "recipes" they set up, and are "replaced" by another 100 students who need to be taught everything.
- computers are tools that require involvment and self-teaching, this idea may be contrary to some of the principles of "education".
- The hardware in the different departments is becoming more and more digital, whereas digital stuff was only in the computer department: that means many more hardware, many more interfaces, many more knowledges to grow and share.
- color workflow is critical in here, and not the easiest thing to setup in a system with different scanners and printers.
Achievements and solutions realized so far
- A documentation covering the subjects of printing and scanning on the different hardwares. we of course use the wiki and find it extremely powerful for that.
- A documentation concerning uses and rules and common things to know about the computer department.
- community news blog for events.
- technical news blog. very important: people feel so easily helpless with computer stuff and they have this (statistically wrong) feeling that computers crash more often than other machines. this blog tells them what's up, what's down.
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more to come
Projects