The doors of CSSD swing wide open to student input. Wednesday March 26, President Link and I had a meeting with Jinx Walton. The agenda was simple: Making the web portal easier to use, Explore options for checking the occupancy levels in the computer labs remotely, and examining a free legal music downloading alternative.
It brings me great pleasure to announce that in a joint effort between Student Government Board, and Computer Services and Systems Development, a Task-Force will be formed to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, and usability of my.pitt.edu. We are interested in bringing together a diverse group of students from all areas of concentration within the
Next, we discussed the sometimes overbearing demand for computers in the campus computing labs. It has been determined long ago that the reason for this is because of the necessity to be at a computer within the lab to print to the university printers. Jinx assures us that CSSD’s “print from anywhere” option will be available by Fall of this year. With this option, you will be able to print any document just as easy as you print in the labs, only you will select which lab you want to print to. It is very important to note that with this new system, we will have open-space printers which you can easily walk up to, swipe your card, and print your documents. Board Members Sanderson and Haddad are ecstatic about this, because we will be cutting down on the wasted cover-page sheets that are currently used in the labs. In addition, these open-space printers will afford CSSD a live Pilot program, and metric, to determine how effective the system would be if all printers were open-space; similar to the systems that many other universities use.
In line with my Platform, I introduced the idea of being able to check the lab usage remotely. CSSD was excited to look into what would be a first-in-nation deployment of this technology.
Last on the Agenda was to examine a free legal music downloading alternative for students. The main topic on this Agenda item was the possibility of using Ruckus to allow students to download music for free. According to a 2006 questionnaire performed by Board Member Joe Leinbach, a big issue is the availability of using the music with Apple products. CSSD, President Link, and I all agreed that we do not want to disenfranchise our Apple students through the selection of an alternative that does not cater to their needs. Since the last time that the Ruckus deal fell through in 2006 for university legal reasons, they have made changes to their options and contracts. I presented these changes to Jinx to have them reviewed. On this issue, we will continue to work and strive that the needs of our students are met. The way students use music, and the nature of music in general lends itself to be a very personal issue with many people. For this reason, we do not want to rush into an option that will force students to adapt to a different music listening lifestyle.
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