It would be useful if the university changed its priorities for classrooms and labs -- but many of us have had the experience of needing one when our equipment is down. So eliminating all the labs probably is not advisable, but maybe one per academic building?
And what about faculty refreshes ... in which faculty get the use of a PC or Mac from their first day. (I don't qualify for one, but I do get to share two with four others in my office.) Should we expect the university to pay for our equipment? how about mileage for coming to and from campus? or for those who teach at more than one campus?
The issue of owning-one's-own is larger than that. Cloud-computing has been gaining adherents over the last couple years. Why buy Office when there is a cloud version? How buys a program to store and organize images and video when you have [insert favorite photo website]? Who owns those images stored on the web? Pause before answering, "Well, I do!" Maybe not. Pity the woman in Cleveland who lost all her photos for the last years when her cell provider discontinued its online albums for non-Smartphone users.
And in our case for our classes, the same cautions apply for our course materials. If you have materials on your CMS, either keep copies on your personal computer, or backup (and download) the materials from the CMS. Wiki materials? again, figure out a way to back it up. You can whack a wiki with Adobe's Acrobat -- not the reader, but the full program -- but then you still have to extract the pages. There used to be a free program called WebWhacker (not the same as the Blue Squirrel program of the same name); and there's HTTracker (I think that's the name).
If you don't have it in your possession, on your own equipment, it isn't safe; and if you don't have your equipment backed up regularly (every week for me), it also isn't safe. I backup my server on campus once a year, only because it isn't usually critical -- except the wiki I run for my classes, and that I back up weekly.
More than once (unfortunately) I've had to restore my main machine because I ran something I shouldn't have. And although I've sometime lost a day's worth of work, it is someone comforting to be able to take 4-5 hours off and come back to the machine as it was on Monday morning at 5AM (I run the backup overnight on Sunday into Monday.) It takes some time, but it saves on the Di-Gel®.
Great advice! I sometimes forget to back up my work - and I, too, have had the misfortune of losing valuable documents because I forgot to back them up. Maybe I need to set up some sort of system to remind myself periodically to do this so nothing gets missed...
ReplyDeleteShannon
It just needs to become a habit -- something my son (and a bad crash) taught me years ago.
DeleteEric,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the advice! Sometimes I forget to save as I am working, but I do usually save everything in dropbox or on my external hard-drive. One of the worst feelings is when you have worked so hard and are nearly completed and you lose some or all of your work.
The document-backup is fairly easy to accomplish. Just copy everything to DropBox, SkyDrive, or any of the online tools that synchronize your work on your other devices. (Every day i back up the day's documents to my netbook, my laptop, and my desktop, and in stressful times (end-of-semester grading)I backup those files to my campus and home servers.
DeleteWhat is the killer is when the operating system goes on the fritz. Win7 is a lot more stable than versions prior to Vista ... tests show it as stable or more so than the Mac OS. But when it goes, sometimes it doesn't come back as easily. (Macs are just as likely to go too -- and I have it on the authority of a former student photographer at KSU that the Apple store may accidentally delete the hard drive instead of repairing it). We need to create an image of the system (files, settings, everything) periodically -- before major upgrades if not every week or so. Then you can sleep peacefully.