Slashdot Mirror
Student-Run IT System Just Makes Sense
dustpuppy writes: "This article talks about how volunteer students took over the administration and operation of the IT facilities at a University of Melbourne residential college. I thought the article worthwhile in that it should remind us that very few other industries have the opportunity where young people can step in and make a very real difference. We really are very lucky to live in the age that we do!" The article feels a little "gee-whiz!" and I hope student-run IT systems aren't are rare as this implies, but a positive case study is great to see. Seems like a lot of academic networks become embroiled in exercise-of-authority games instead of cooperation. Anyone with academic-net experiences, please speak up.
Being a volunteer producer for Public Access Television, I know the satisfaction of working for motavations other than for personal financial gain. It's a lot of fun, and the stuff that Public Access produces could not be produced any other way.
But senior professionals do have some merit. Kids come cheap, but old grey-hair wizards have wisdom that only years of experience can provide, and I argue this wisdom has value. So let's think a little before we replace all the senior elders with pimpled geeks.
I was at Stanford when they decided to replace their old, ugly web page with a "bigger and better" one. $50,000 later, they had one of the ugliest web pages I'd ever seen. Ugly, no problem-- it was easy to navigate, right? Wrong. Everything useful was buried under 10 or so levels of seemingly irrelevant links.
The problem? The web page was made by "professionals" who had no idea what the students or faculty needed from their web page. It was a decent advertisement for the school (aside from being really ugly), but the removal of the old site meant students and staff were left stranded for quite some time.
The entire project was finished in several months-- about the time span of 1-2 quarters. Now imagine instead the learning experience that could have come from a course dedicated to creating the site. HCI would be taught for design; databases, algorithms etc. would be taught for all of the back end. It would have been a great learning experience for all involved, and the end result would have been a web site the students and faculty would have actually used.
Instead, what eventually happened is they spent more and more money to make a slightly less crappy web page. Now, it's back to pretty much how it was before the whole fiasco, only everything's a little tougher to find.
I am currently one of the heads of a group of students at LBJ High School(www.lbjhs.net) in Austin,Tx that runs
our network. Back sometime around 1995 a group of students formed a computer club that quickly grew into much more than just that. Before long this club wanted a decent conection to the internet, since the school district was very against this because they are afraid of students being in control they found funding from other sources and obtained a T1. We now have about 10 servers that run mainly Linux but also include a mix of NT, Novell and AIX. We also maintain about 500 computers. All of this work is done by only students and our network has quickly outgrown the one that the School District installed but is afraid of letting students touch.
for more information visit http://www.stac.org and
http://www.lbjhs.net
Jess Haas
Senior Network Admin
The are only a few real problem that I see (and have seen) with a school IT department with a lot of dependence on student workers.
(1) Students have a very limited amount of time in the department. It's like an IT shop with a really high turnover rate.
(2) The quality of student workers is very hit and miss. If a really talented student comes in and sets up a few good systems then graduates, other students are not always able to step in a maintain or update the system.
(3) The actual full-time IT workers become more paranoid and will spend a lot of time securing the network from their own workers. The high turnover along with the inevitable "bad apples" destroys trust between the full-time staff and the student workers.
That said, I still think that students should definitely have the option (or requirement, even) to work in a school IT department. For many programming students, it could be the only hardware/administration job they ever have, and it will help them understand computers on a different level.
I found my school's computer center to be a great place to gain experience. Unfortunately, since it was my first hardware tech job and it dealt exclusively with networked computers, I learned nothing about modems. Later, I took a job with a local PC shop doing tech work, and a large portion of the problems that I had to deal with were modem problems. It wasn't a big deal because I picked up on the modem stuff in a short amount of time, but it was a definite weakness after my college IT experience.
If you can read this, then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously".
I was at Xavier University when this whole web thing started, and the University's first few web pages were all volunteer-student run. There was NO cooperation from the administration for a while, tho... we had to hack some open source web servers to get around security issues so that people could have personal home pages, and server space was limited to what we could scrounge.
Eventually the administration cought up, but then they took over, and the result is a far less cutting edge product than could have been realized if students were to continue using the systems for learning and gaining real-world skills.
Still, schools have all these students that actively want to learn, and are capable of doing the technical stuff. The trick isn't the students; it's getting the administration buy-in. My one piece of advice to anyone wanting to do this is to find a way to make your school's administration let you do this... probably best to get your CS teacher to champion the cause all the way up the chain o' command as part of a "computer club" project. And NEVER let anyone else take over the beurocratic end of things.
...as a student assistant sysop were most excellent.
All of this has been to my benefit now that I'm working full-time. Good experience, good training. Even the professors liked it.
(I wonder if I'll be able to post this, given that /. seems determined to forget who I am...)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
It seems like lately I've been seeing story after story that basically says 'look - tech savvy kids are smarter than stupid adults!' Perhaps this is just Slashdot speaking to its target audience (which skews young I'm sure), but I have to wonder if a story like 'Students ruin school network' would ever make it to the front page.
At Georgia Tech, the main IT stuff is still handled by professionals. However, the student organization server, cyberbuzz, is student run. Personally, I think this is a good mix -- the Really Important services are handled by people who can afford to have monitoring 24/7 and such, while the less mission critical stuff gives students a chance to do IT stuff.
I work for the University of Minnesota computer science department. I'm a part time sysadmin/webmaster. The pay and hours are good, and I've gained valuable experience.
The staff ratio is about 50/50 students to fulltimers. The students handle most of the tech support grunt work and are assigned more in depth jobs as time and ability allows. Recently I've been assigned to do almost entirely web work-- some html writing and a fair amount of CGI scripting.
I think student-run IT departments are a good thing. We get experience, the U gets cheap labor, and everyone ends up happy. The level of professionalism and the relationship between fulltimers and students has been excellent. Most of the staff are former U students, so things work out quite well.
I think I'm extremely lucky to have a job that allows me to support myself, take classes, and build my resume all at the same time. Most of my friends make less than I do for tedious grunt work. CS students today really are spoiled.
In my 10+ years as a IT/IS/Sysadmin. I have seen students with 100 times more talent and ability than any "professional" I have met. (Professional as in a certified whatever) Students can do IT/IS work faster,easier,and more creativly than any of us old hats. But, It's us old hat's that are keeping the student down with the "security" issues, ("you're too young to have that kind of access"," I need accountability for this task","bla bla bla, yadda yadda") which are all just empty excuses to chase that teenager/college student out of the room. If a student shows the ability to handle a security clearance, then give them one! It is too often that we professionals spend more time trying to cover our own asses than doing our jobs.
I say YES to student run IT. but... never bcome lax on security and clearances... Only an idiot would give root access to the domain to a student that cant keep their mouth shut, or cant help themselves when they come across email/documents/whatever.
There are trustworthy students out there, as many as "professional" IT's that are trustworthy. (Note: I dont trust many professional IT people I meet. too many are jerks/power freaks. Hell one bragged once how he was posting some user's email to a public forum just for kicks. and this guy was a senior admin!)
The bad part? some students will get burned bad when something crashes and the administration goes looking for heads.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I like the idea, but for many Universities it's just not an option. At my University, there are 40,000 students alone, not including all the faculty & support staff required to maintain an institution of this size.
Keeping all of this up and running requires many full-time network admins, and in some areas round-the-clock support staff. Plus some of the older secretaries mentioned in an earlier post tend to mistrust student employees.
However, that doesn't mean that there is no room for student involvement. I personally work for the Residential Network (dorms, etc.) and there are opportunities for students in departmental networks (Zoology, etc.), central IT division, and numerous computer labs. Our student web hosting services are also student run. Students fill extremely varied positions, from maintaining large servers to teaching classes on computers through the labs.
So I salute the universities out there with entirely student-run IT. I just have one question for you. How do you convince older University employees that you're there to fix the computer, not steal it?
Duct tape is like the Force, it has a light side and a dark side and it holds the universe together.
In an ideal world, student run IT systems would be common place, but unfortunately there are too many issues with trust and beurocratic accountability that must be overcome in the eyes of the admins, which is a real pain.
Still, I suppose that fighting this sort of discrimination and wrong headed beurocracy can result in a greater experience of the ways of the world for these students.
A good preparation for real life.
--
Clarity does not require the absence of impurities,
/* And you'll never guess what the dog had */
/* in its mouth... */
--Larry Wall in stab.c from perl
It would be nice if this was possible, but for me at least it isn't. You know the amount of trouble there would be for everyone if it went wrong?
I dread to think what the High Up Authorities would say if they heard "yeah, some student just trashed all our network". It wouldn't happen, but our sysadmin won't risk his job on it anyway.
Student-run IT system means student root and to my college that's unacceptable.
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
Also, for many years before Project Athena started, there was SIPB, the Student Information Processing Board, which was all student-run, and provided the all-access computational facility for members of the campus. Students also ran many of the large academic computational facilities, such as the fabled EECS system (a PDP-10 which had a nasty habit of thrashing the nights before problem sets were due) used for such courses as Software Engineering, Introduction to Programming, etc.
And these things all ran well. Why? Because unlike some suit who went home at 5pm, the students had a vested interest in these systems and were available at nearly all hours. Sure there were problems, but there were some very creative answers. And the students running these systems understood the computational needs of the users -- because they had shared experiences. They knew how bad it could be when the main server died during the week before finals. They cared.
The bad part of this was that being in one of these (only sometimes paid) positions usually carried a hefty price in terms of academic performance. These students were essentially working full-time jobs in addition to taking full loads.
Is there a better solution? I'm not sure. At MIT, a paid professional staff won't be as talented as the students, won't be as dedicated, and won't be as responsive. But the community won't be taking undue advantage of them, either. For other institutions, a different answer might, naturally, be more appropriate.
- pz.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
College used to have a cluster of Suns, but they gradually became unmaintained and were removed after they were all hacked. As a result, we ended up with a bunch of Windows machines and no UNIX provision. What we ended up doing was designing a net-booting Linux system that required no access to the local hard drive (documentation here) and just used that until the COs finally gave up and made it official. At around the same time, people finally gave up with the university's policy regarding undergraduate access to UNIX systems (ie, the only general provision would be access to the mail server running a heavily limited shell designed for the express purpose of reading email and carrying out various mail-related tasks) and set up a university-wide service with some support from the student union. The SRCF was the result. Of course, both these could probably have gone very differently if the authorities had taken a different view of things (the SRCF was set up after consultation with the university computing service, and our Linux system happened to coincide with a time when the college COs were too busy fighting with each other to give a damn what we did), but even so if you're unhappy with the computing facilities available to you it is worth attempting to do something about it.
My school, North Carolina State University, eventually saw the light as well.
When we had Consultants running the show, they suggested using Windows NT 4.0, and we have a lot of machines running that. However, they are slow and unstable, especially with third-party add-ons for Kerberos and AFS, and they also leak memory like a sieve.
However, some students working for the University (friends of mine) worked on Linux for the realm. It has its share of problems too, because it hasn't been worked on as much as Solaris, and we don't have a lot of apps compiled in the lockers for it, but it's *far* more stable than NT ever was, and has better support for AFS and Kerberos.
Incidentally, the original reason for switching to NT was so we could have apps like Word and Excel and Powerpoint. But now we have a cluster running Citrix Metaframe that does that. And for us engineers, it's much more important that we have other apps where we *already* have licenses on the Unix side of things, or sometimes don't need licenses...
Anyhow, I hope they keep improving the Linux side of things; it's come along decently, and we owe it all to the students.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
At my Maryland High school, the entire school network is run by students. There are several labs in different areas, each with its own Win2K server. Students set up these servers (as far as network setup), configured clients, setup policies and all of the other expected routines. Problems with IP conflicts (the school gets internet access through a Comcast cable modem, who has decided that they will have control over the DHCP server which assigns private IPs) have been handled by students, along with various other problems.
It's a good system, although most of the work is done by a very small group of students who have done some brown-nosing to get there. I originally wanted to be a part of this team, but I decided the hoops I had to jump through and the unfair hierarchy where unqualified students are given more power wasn't something I wanted to deal with.
This is one problem with letting students have full control. Power corrupts, and being given this power without necessarily having the maturity to handle it can cause some serious ego trips and other problems.
-----------------
Kevin Mitchell
I've found that in my experience, most of the network is managed by university employees, but most of the grunt work (network administration, tech support, etc) is managed by the students because of the cheap labor they offer. Most of the network planning and implementation is done by the university employees and management though.
My experience: Politics Ruled, first, last and always.
A typical example. I wanted to run an IPv6 testbed, to gather experience on how to handle such a network. Answer: "No. It might damage our network."
Stage 2: Write a white paper, outlining how the head of the computer centre could increase the priority of his e-mail, using IPv6. The node was running within a week.
I could give other examples - there are many - on the infighting (Linux vs. Apple vs. Solaris), the politics (who can run servers? who has access to a secure system?), etc.
Nor was this the only such place such conflicts have taken place. The University of Glamorgan, at one point, banned the use of Gopher, because they wanted to have absolute central control on what outside connections people could run.
Fact is, central control of this kind seems to breed a kind of delusional paranoia usually seen in axe-wielding psychopaths.
It's my honest opinion that computer centers should have mandatory psychological check-ups, every 3-4 months, before the plebs who run them do something really stupid.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)