This is an idea that I proposed to the school's head of teaching and learning a while back. I have been toying with the idea that a new student society was needed within the school of computing which was aimed at those students who are interested in computing and want to engage in extra-curricular projects. This is as a response to the old MACS society which I hated when I was an undergrad here because it felt very cliquey, and basically I was enough of a geek to want to spend my non-academic hours doing interesting computer stuff with other geeks, and MACS didn't really support this. Unfortunately, to my mind, MACS was move of a glorified drinking club which had a number of high profile events, such as paintballing or film nights, but no day-to-day geekery.
Other computing schools run groups like
GeekSoc and the
Tardis project which were exactly like what I wanted to get involved in myself. So my suggestion was for a student society that could be run as a business by the students, possibly with faculty oversight, and which could provide computing services primarily to the school but also to local charities and businesses. This gives the students valuable experience of the real skills required to run a business but also means that they can experience the joys of administrating an information infrastructure.
The GeekSoc is run at Strathclyde and has the following charter:
- To provide instruction on computing hardware, software and issues surrounding comptuing
- To offer an environmentwhere projects of a technical nature can be implemented and supported
- To facilitate video gaming on all mediums through C&L Gaming
- To offer other entities support of a technical nature, if deemed feasible by GeekSoc's Administration Group
- To offer GeekSoc Members opportunities to visit/attend places/events of a technical nature
Whereas the Tardis Project is a student run computing facility which has been running successfully since 1987 at the University of Edinburgh with the main aim of allowing students at the university to be involved in running a large computing system, and gain the experience required to design, build and maintain such a system.
Some useful services that they could offer would be a blogs service for the school, a school LAMP server, and alumni email accounts;
- A server enabling any member of the school to easily set up a blog which was served and supported within the school would be both a useful pedagogic and research tool. Researchers could set up new collaboration blogs to support the open notebook culture, or to promote their research without having to set up their own server hardware. Students could keep track of their personal development, personal projects, and academic work in an electronic format. Whilst many students are beginning to do this for their honours projects, and others are required to do this as a part of various undergraduate modules, they are currently relying upon external hosts to provide blogging services or temporary hosts if the blogging activity is a part of a specific module. The school as a whole would benefit from being able to easily set up new blogs without having to deal with infrastructure or rely upon external hosts, and the students would benefit from an easy way to promote themselves and their work.
- Just having a LAMP server within the school would be an advantage. Much of the school is geared towards the Microsoft way of doing computing, but gaining a wider understanding of the software ecosystem would be advantageous to our student endeavour s.
- Alumni email has been discussed often in the past. When I first graduated here there was talk of enabling graduate computing students to keep their @computing.dundee.ac.uk addresses. We are only talking of around 20-30 addresses each year but this would be a great way to keep the alumni feeling as though they are still a part of the school. If we look to the American model of university funding, where a great deal of money comes from successful alumni, then maintaining that contact with our alumni seems like a potentially very valuable for little initial outlay.
Anyhow it looks like the idea might be starting to make progress as there was an item on the agenda of the last staff-student meeting and some action items were identified as a result.
