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StaffIncremental BloggerWireless Access for Music Professors

Wireless Access for Music Professors

Thanks for your question, Dr. Copeland, about reasons for adding wireless service to your music department’s technology capacity at the University of Alabama – Birmingham. Here are my thoughts as a former university administrator.

First, I’d want to hear a compelling case for spending departmental money to modify the wired service we already have.

1.1 Do we need wireless electronic connections to databases, etc.? Probably not. Musicians have performed, composed, etc. for eons without it. Artists are creative and will figure out ways to continue their art without wireless connections.

1.2 Will wireless help you fulfill one or more of your contracted professional duties? This one you have already started working through on your blog. I’d listen for you to distinguish between wireless helping you with your professional procedures, i.e., conducting or composing, and with the content of those procedures, i.e., annotations/prompts for signaling 1st tenors to emphasize a phrase or ideas that occur to you in the hallway that you want to note before you forget them.

1.3 Will anyone else use wireless if we have it? You know your colleagues and can delineate their preferences and outline their artistic and academic uses.

1.4 What cost/benefit will occur from spending $$$$.$$ for a wireless system? This is simple on the face, but tricky to distinguish it from number 1.2. Estimate the dollar costs of products identified in 1.2 with and without wireless. The second part of this question is, What do we do with the hard wired system?

A second category of perhaps unasked questions has to do with external validity of a wireless system.

2.1 So what? If we have a wireless system, in the grand scheme of professional academy based music, what difference will it make? Describe what other higher education music programs have, how UAB can take a leadership position in augmenting traditional and other advanced technology systems, and how the PR value can be used to attract technology informed musicians and music students.

2.2 OK, so we buy in, how long will it be state-of-the-art? Probably only as long as the hard wired system was, maybe a year, maybe two years. That means “we” must benefit sufficiently in one or two years to make the system pay for itself.

You can likely convince me to approve your request. You answers to these questions should, though, be sufficient to convince those up the university business chain. The key to their conviction is to describe a fly to honey proposition, so administrators have confidence that this request will not come back to bite them unexpectedly in the future, irrespective of how important a faculty member thinks it is.

Anyway, Doc, that’s my initial thinking. I hope it helps, and that it complements responses you receive from Rob Bushway, J. Kendrick, and others in the Tablet PC community. They have good ideas.

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  1. Great thinking, professor. I should have added more details for you. The university already has wireless covering the campus. In the cost-based (?) accounting system we have, each department must pay $5 per month per professor after a $20 set up fee. I wanted to pay this myself to get access to the university wireless system but it can only be charged to the department, not to an individual.Interesting, eh?So, bottom line, the wireless access is there, but it will cost a little bit to get it.My department chair wanted us to develop a rationale for how it would help the STUDENTS–and I thought that was worthy of a discussion in our blog world.Thanks for your comments, they are excellent.

  2. I probably should have read your request more carefully. I like your chair’s interest in helping students. About students, I’d listen for reasons following the same logic as for professors. The main rationale for both seems to be to have unteathered access to databases, for exchanging assignments / file sharing, etc. without a cable. You already know these reasons. I’ve wondered about using wireless campus access to offer remote collaborative composing, remotely distributed choruses, almost anything that could be done in a classroom being done with greater distances between participants, whether beyond a wall or beyond campus. This is a tangent to your main question, but I’m curious. Do music score databases exist the way Google is creating printed book databases? If so, would wireless access to them yield more convenience for students?