The basic routine for any shadowing shift is get there, learn something about a work responsibility, then go on my merry way. Rather, the interesting parts are the questions by end-users. The goal of TLT, as I see it, is to assist and help users (students and professors) such that the tools we offer are useable and aren’t hinderances in their intricacies. The means to that end are having the help desk create documentation as well as general support, and the site managers to assist students in real time, in person. For each generation of new consultants, the task is to (a) teach previous solutions to common problems, and (b) get new ideas on how to better educate the community on these complex tools (like EchoCenter and the instructor’s version of Blackboard).

I thought about this as I was telling my father what my job was like, and realized a simple way to summarize it is this:

We take a complicated system and bring it to a small number of configuration options so everyone can use it well enough, as my father does with boats.

Given the difference in expertise here (mechanics vs. software), I ended up making the exact same simplifications I would have made explaining these websites to end-users, but on a large enough scale so the big picture can be seen. At that point, I believe I saw exactly what I would be doing as a senior consultant.

This also makes sense from my last experience with help desk on Thursday – mostly no calls, but in the last 15 minutes there were two, and one was from a professor about a specialized application for her classes that Stony Brook provides.

The point I run towards here is that professors are given large amounts of tools to educate with, but these tools themselves are much more complex than the students’ versions. As a student, you just see an upload assignment here button, but the professor needs to

• Add the assignment and points
• Configure when it appears and disappears
• Configure a ‘late’ deadline
• Add links in the announcement page (optionally)
• Attach any needed directions

If a professor also does research in a field far away from computer science and just started teaching, the time needed to remember these steps might be too much. That’s why we have a help desk — to make quick work of a confusing system.