Please forgive the clichéd title – I normally prefer not to use the word “thing”, but in this case, I saw the benefit of the commonplace idiom as worth using.

My 2nd shadowing week has started, and here I immediately see the benefit to shadowing during a busy shift. The simple fact that more people are walking in and out of the site causes more issues that I wouldn’t learn by asking questions to pop up, and I can see how a current senior consultant would handle such issues.

To be concrete: normally, when I learn, I jump to whatever is on my mind. However, when trying to learn set procedures, such a disorganized way of learning would not facilitate retention of everything. Because I see that now, I fully respect being taught in a set order, then dealing with oddball questions, so (a) my notes are neater, and (b) there’s a rhyme and reason to what was learned.

UPDATE: Much has been learned! In my first hour at the Teaching Learning Lab, I saw a typical hour working at the Help Desk. This entails much of what I saw previously (answering phones/chats/emails and walk-in requests), but much more frequently. Rather, the big addition to my set of knowledge was the TLT Media Lab, which I never knew existed until now (probably because it wasn’t on the TV’s around campus).

 

(Source: http://it.stonybrook.edu/services/teaching-learning-lab)

Headed by Paul St. Dennis, this lab focuses on anything multimedia: poster printing, video/audio format conversions, and gamification of class content.

In addition to this, I learned that mysbfiles can act as a static HTML webpage server, if HTML files are placed in the right folder. This is useful for web workshops for the general campus, especially those without Sparky accounts (or Linux navigational skills, which should be another workshop).

As for how this affects my view of being a Senior Consultant, I once again see how the world of DoIT is a large place that I only know surface details about. While my decision on whether to want to be a Site Manager or Help Desk consultant is unphased, I see that both positions are equal in effort needed, but different in what kind of effort and the result achieved. Site Managers learn to manage and schedule other consultants, but Help Desk consultants help all people in being better users of existing technology.