“When the cat’s away the mice will play”….
It’s a very cliché maxim but, it precisely explains the events on a college campus when a vast majority of the students are away.
The campus, particularly the IT department, is “playing” right now. Many things are being changed. Departments are merging; new ones are being created; old ones, now obsolete, cease to exist. For these reasons I’ve decided to merge, weeks three and four. Crazy idea, I know.
Week three I was at Media Services, a department previously responsible for various tasks. They were responsible for classroom media support. Such things like projectors, instructor carts speaker system etc. were their responsibility. They also set up audio/video systems for guest speakers and lectures.
The department is being eliminated and is currently in the transition period. Its responsibilities and task will be divided amongst the other subgroups of IT. Because of this transition/elimination there wasn’t much to be done. The few tasks to complete were very basic: maintenance on various printers around campus, picking up a conference phone from a meeting and packing things for the transition.
Week four was more productive. It sadly was only one day because of the holiday and a bus failing to show up. In the one day in Administrative Computing with Patti I learned a lot about a subject in which I’m very ignorant, coding and programming.
I’ve seen code and am familiar with it enough to recognize and do basic things, like HTML. But I was in no way familiar with programming code on a vast database such as Butler’s. The task was to go into the BUPD database and creating a new type of parking permit. While this may sound easy it was a little bit more complex than originally thought. But, I survived and learned a little something, copy and paste is your friend. As Patti said,
“If the codes already there, just copy and paste. Then customize it for your needs. No need to make it hard on yourself.”
Good word of advice.
After finishing the code in under an hour, great time I might add, we were scheduled for a meeting with the director of Human Resources. The meeting pertained to issues she was having switching to a new database. During the meeting the magic light bulb went off in my head,
“This is a Step of the ADDIE model, the development phase.”
We were debugging issues and preparing a way to train the other employees on the new system, AKA implementation.
“I’m a genius!”
Friday was supposed to be the testing day to make sure our coding actually worked before releasing it to the public. Sadly, my bus did not arrive that day so, I didn’t have the opportunity to participate. Next time Patti…next time.