Processing Power: Tech Team Keeps the College Relevant
TECHNOLOGY TIP What was your first car? What is your pet’s name? What was the name of your elementary school? Innocent questions posed to you via Facebook quizzes and memes? Or hackers trying to uncover security questions used in two-factor bank authentication? Hard to determine, according to Ralph Yingling, director of information technology. “It’s important to think about what you are sharing via social media. Connecting socially can be a great thing in many ways, but there are risks, with many people using the platforms for purposes other than entertainment and networking.”
tech team keeps the college relevant
Punch cards—that is the first personal technological memory that Ralph Yingling, B.B.A.’87, director of information technology for the college, can recall. That memory comes from his time in the Air Force. Yingling’s first job at WMU was running a mainframe computer that supported 20 users plus two classrooms. “Today, my cell phone has much more computing power than that computer,” says Yingling. “Information technology changes daily.”
Alex Roelandt, B.B.A.’10, MBA’16, network administrator and part-time instructor in computer information systems, recalls his first encounter with a computer for educational purposes. “I was in elementary school, and we had software that helped you learn how to read and sound out words. My interest in technology dates back to that moment.”
This duo is responsible for running IT services for the college, supporting all students, faculty and staff.
The most challenging aspect of the job? Managing the student computing environment. It’s a job that involves research, upgrades and purchasing, which Yingling and Roelandt oversee, along with the day-to-day operations in the labs and computer classrooms, which fall under their fellow staffer Bill Rotgers’ list of responsibilities.
“It’s a fine balance,” says Yingling. “We have to embrace what’s current, and yet we are stewards of other people’s money—student tuition, state dollars and funding from other sources—and need to responsibly invest in technology that will serve the most students in the best possible ways.”
Roelandt agrees, “We need to be relevant but also mindful of what the greatest needs are. We are here to evaluate what technology is going to give students a skill that they can apply in any environment.”
As we know, emerging technology has many starts and stops, and often gets abandoned in favor of something that does the job more efficiently. “We have to be simultaneously progressive and conservative,” says Yingling. “Beta testing has its place, but in an environment where budgets are constrained, it is important to be judicious in the choices you make, especially in an area that can be very costly.”
A current area that Yingling and Roelandt are discussing with IT colleagues from across campus is virtualization—the concept of an area on the server that represents your technological profile and stores the programs you need, your documents and everything that makes up your tech fingerprint, which can be accessed from anywhere. “Much of the software that is provided at WMU currently needs a login at a University machine for a variety of reasons,” says Yingling. “However, we know that accessing everything virtually is what students are used to and what corporations are adopting more and more.”
Though Yingling and Roelandt work with machines regularly, they think about people constantly. “We think about how students use technology, but it goes deeper than that,” says Roelandt. “We know that what WMU offers is interaction with faculty and fellow students—that is what we are about as an institution. Technology offers tools to support that, but it will never entirely replace the importance of other people in a student’s learning. The critical thinking skills that help you tackle unstructured decision making are all about how you learn to interact with others in complex, real-world situations.”