Lab Man Presentations

Attendee Presentations

Karen Renkiewicz (University of Notre Dame) - How to Hire 100 Student Employees in 4 Hours
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Summary: The Office of Information Technologies at the University of Notre Dame employees over 100 students in our computer labs and classroom support group. Two years ago we changed the entire process and hosted a "job fair" where students could stop by, fill out an application, test their technical skills in a hands-on "obstacle course" and be interviewed by the student managers of their preferred computer lab. The net result is that our hiring process is compressed into 1 day, and while intensive, we have found that everyone involved prefers to have the process shortened. We will discuss the overall process, the publicity used on campus, and the part student manager's play.

Vincent Spiars (Wesleyan University) - Lab Management from Your Comfy Chair
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Summary:
Lab management can be expensive, physically taxing and inefficient by its very nature. I have gathered a few tools that are either free, are inexpensive or may be included with utilities you already have to pay for in your general functions. Among them are VNC Scan, Apple Remote Desktop, VPN, Ghost and scheduling tasks, NetBoot and NetRestore to name a few. I know that there will be specific configurations necessary to make this work at your location. So this is more of an overview of what can be done. Not a "How to" to set this up for your institution. I hope you can join me for this chat on how I keep things running from anywhere on campus. Or even while I am away but still have network connectivity and my laptop.

Paul Brown (Indiana State University) - Creating and Managing an IT Exploration Laboratory for Research and Teaching Faculty
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Summary:
The Center for Instruction, Research, and Technology has developed a faculty-centered computer laboratory focused on providing faculty access to new and emerging technologies to be utilized in their instruction and research. The laboratory, appropriately named the "Digital Sandbox" consists of technologies and applications centered on multimedia creation, digital/analog video editing, high-performance computing, high-performance networking, Internet2, podcasting, vodcasting, quantitative analysis (AMOS, EQS, Minitab, MLwiN, SAS, SPSS), qualitative analysis (Ethnograph, QSR N6/NVivo), and spatial/network analysis. This presentation will focus on the building, supporting, and continually updating of the digital sandbox as well as methods and best-practices used to encourage faculty to engage in innovative research and instruction.

Kevin Reynen (Bradley University) - phpLabMan - An Equipment Checkout System and Other FREE Applications

Summary:
phpLabMan's biggest application is the Equipment Checkout System . The php/mysql based checkout is designed to meet the needs of a university equipment checkout by grouping students and equipment by class and limiting availability by those groupings. Equipment kits are also grouped with accessories so that smaller items (batteries, lens caps, etc.) are tracked as well. Additional applications developed by the phpLabMan group include a laptop based Attendance System that utilizes an Apple iSight camera and a USB card swipe to record attendance. This session will cover everything a lab admin needs to know to get the phpLabMan applications running and how they can contribute to the project.

Tom Johnson (Purdue University) - Radmind
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Summary:
Radmind is a free open-source suite of command line tools available for UNIX, Mac OS X, and just recently, Windows. For Mac OS X there is also a graphical interface - Radmind Assistant. At its core radmind operates as a tripwire, detecting changes to any managed filesystem object - files, directories, links, etc. However radmind goes further than just integrity checking - once a change is detected, radmind can reverse the change in an automated fashion. It is this ability that allows radmind to go beyond just a security tool, but also to be used as an automated file/software distribution/maintenance mechanism. This discussion will cover basic radmind concepts, how Purdue uses radmind to maintain the academic Mac labs, and an introduction to the recently ported Windows version of radmind.

Shruti Trivedi ( The Ohio State University) - Aligning Technology and Business Processes for Innovation in Teaching and Learning

Summary:
CITL (Center for Innovations in Technology for Learning) is a hybrid multimedia lab to aid faculty and teaching staff in designing instructional and interactive materials to support teaching and research. CITL Multimedia Lab provides hardware and advanced software tools for the development of technologically advanced course contents. As the pioneer in piloting the new technology tools on campus, CITL was faced with balancing countervailing forces: maintaining and upgrading multi-OS desktops and wireless laptops, multimedia hardware and software inventory management, user management, network security, and software and patch deployment with faculty and staff support. The author will discuss the implementation of the migration plan to centralized management in order to reduce the operating cost and minimize lab support on the one hand and, to provide up-to-date service with the minimum disruption in services and increasing flexibility and customeon the other.

Pei-Yi Hu (Indiana State University) - Hybrid Method to Secure and Maintain Lab Machines
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Summary:
Indiana State University Labs had been using Reborn card to protect the lab machines from being altered by users for about 5 years now. The early version of the card required physical visits to the machines whenever any updates needed to be performed. With Version 3 of Reborn card, updating systems become easier. Our latest research and testing had allowed us to automate this process with the use of different tools that is currently available to us and is the basis of this presentation.

Matthew Maynard (Griffith University (Australia)) - Reporting and Statistics of Enterprise Labs
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Summary:
Griffith University supports over 2000 machines on 7 different campuses with a very small team of only 4 people. The presentation will cover the systems management and reporting tools that allows the flexibility and manageability to maintain such a fleet with minimal little support costs. It shows a proactive support and development model with full fleet hardware and student auditing, and also reporting and statistical analysis of the fleet and student trends.

Vendor Presentation Topics
Apple: TBD
Big Bang: Symantec Ghost and Universal Imaging
Faronics: Workstation Security and Control
LANDesk: IT Systems Management and Change Control in the Computing