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 Every school has an internal department responsible for
providing networking, programming, IT services and technical
support for campus faculty, staff and students. Unfortunately,
too often those departments are in a separate silo which does
not cooperate effectively with the advanced and specialized
needs of ICT academic departments. The Mid-Pacific ICT Center
can help facilitate functional, collaborative relationships
between ICT education and institutional IT departments.
City College of San Francisco (CCSF), for example, has a
highly cooperative relationship between its
Information Technology Services (ITS) department and its
ICT academic programs (CNIT
and CS
departments). Students
have
benefitted from:
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Access to a 36 mile optical fiber ring
for hands-on experience in optical
networking
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Exposure to a complex, real-world, 2,000
handset VoIP telephony implementation
-
An opportunity to contribute to a 10,000 port Ethernet
switch replacement project
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An opportunity to support the campus WiFi service
implementations
CCSF Network Manager, Tim Ryan, is a Co-PI on the MPICT grant.
College network and IT operations are often modern and
sophisticated. Students could benefit from seeing how those
real world operations are designed, managed and operated.
ICT
programs frequently need advanced support from IT departments:
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Operating sophisticated applications
through campus firewalls
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Hosting specialized applications and student access
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Connecting ICT programs and students across networks for
collaborations between schools
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Implementing distance learning, online, Web2.0 and other
specialized services
 MPICT can help by:
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Championing the importance of this issue,
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Modeling successful collaborations,
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Mediating conversations between IT and academic
departments
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Facilitating cross-institutional networked collaborations
to benefit education
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Championing internship, site visit, classroom speaker, job
placement and other opportunities with institutional IT
departments
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