The cluster room lives on – but look out for the ‘un cluster’

I spent the morning of the first day of the Educause conference in a workshop on the future of the cluster room (or computer lab) led by Keith Boswell from North Carolina State University and Beth Schaefer from the Uni of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.   It was well attended – I reckon 60 folk in the room – and we spent over an hour going around the room sharing tales of cluster-related challenges – increasing pressure on space, patchy usage, challenges of keeping up with students’ needs and expectations in terms of software and hardware, problems with the balance between open access (wanted by students) and teaching clusters (wanted by staff), with some institutions wondering whether to wait for the next generation of tablet-pc hybrids or to replace old pcs like for like. It’s clear that the challenges that we face at UCL are shared across the pond.  However I’d say that for most of those in the workshop the cluster room remains an important part of their university’s IT provision – the death of the cluster room has been exaggerated.

I did find out about a couple of nice approaches to power management used at North Carolina State – one was setting PCs to hibernate after a few minutes of inactivity can save a lot of money and energy. Another was the use of ‘lab stats’ data which logs which PCs are used most, and for how long – we saw some hot spot maps of cluster rooms showing that students tend to favour certain locations in a room for quick turnaround activities (email/printing/Facebook check) but will sit in different seats for extended work – this allows different power management regimes to be applied for different PCs. Thinking about it, perhaps we might even use this to zone open access spaces with different spec workstations, furniture etc for different patterns of use…

I also heard about the ‘Un Lab’ – again at North Carolina – where the university had looked carefully at what was needed in terms of connectivity, power, space, file storage, software deployment, lockers etc in order to allow students to use their own computers and so reduce the need for institutional workstations. They had focused on Engineering students and called the resulting computing environment EoS.   All useful stuff, though I still predict that the more that students use smaller devices liken iPads the less likely they are to want to bring in laptops and – as I can testify writing this on a iPad (as I don’t have a laptop) – they are not ideal for writing extended prose! So we might want some decent Un Clusters at UCL but we do also need to keep providing hardware…

Printing is a big issue with lots of institutions planning ‘follow-me’ printing and printing from student owned devices although few seemed to have implemented these as yet. The other source of shared pain is weaning students – but more critically staff – off printing and encouraging more reading on screen. A particular gripe is requirement to print coursework for submission even when it is also submitted online.

A couple of leads to follow up :

• Griffith University in Australia have done some work on innovative technology-enhanced teaching spaces, and have set up a pinterest site with a bunch of images – pinterest.com/learningspaces
• The University of New Mexico have a number of space-related initiatives including large ‘active learning classrooms’, interactive lecture theatres (set up to allow students to swivel round and work with those behind/in front), wireless projection (which made their network group unhappy…) and mirroring technology (allowing devices like iPads to be mirrored on PCs).
• And more than one institution cited the University of Minnesota as a source of inspiration (see their active learning classroom site)…

Finally I was surprised to hear that many US institutions levy an ‘educational technology fee’ on their students. Bet that goes down well.

My next post will be about active learning classrooms…