Provider vs Facilitator the difference between learning and research computing support

I have been mulling over this, this last week. What I write now is to try and get some clarity on what the difference is between learning computer support and research computer support. Now learning and research are two functions of the University. Historically it was "teaching" but then I suspect that today's educational  climate prefers to characterise what goes on with taught students from their perspective rather than that of the staff. So I am using learning. However I do want to draw the boundaries between learning and research, because research is often seen as just a form of learning.

A person who comes to learn a subject is learning how to navigate through that subject. They can become very proficient at this and become highly skilled within that subject. Indeed at the higher levels they quite often will be going to books and journals on their own in order to gain the knowledge they want to gain. The academic staff in the university may well not have that knowledge but and this is the crucial thing, someone somewhere else does. That is why they can go to the books and into the journals to find that knowledge. A researcher is not learning to navigate a topic, they are explorers. That is they are trying to find or create knowledge that nobody knew before. The primary stuff they are interested isn't in the books or the journals because books and journals only tells you where somebody else has been. That is not to say that knowing the subject thoroughly and doing literature searches are a waste of time, if you did not do them, you would not know what was old territory and what was new.

This means that when the University central services support research, it is not the same as supporting learning. When we support learning we aim to provide the necessary computer tools for an individual to come proficient at navigating the subject they have chosen to study at University level. That is not to say students may not decide to use other tools. I can remember back in the 1980s sometimes buying alternative texts books as I was struggling with the ones recommended by the class. The recommended texts were in the University library, the alternative texts weren't.  So to with what central learning computer support. It does not support everything a student might do but it does support enough that you should not have to get other computer resources. However doing this relies on the fact that students are learning to navigate a known subject and we already have access to expert navigators of that subject (i.e. academic staff) so we can ask the staff what tools do they need and work with them to provide a good enough set.

With researchers we cannot do this. Yes we can provide the navigation tools that we provide to learners but those really will only take you so far. There are specific generic skills researchers need to develop e.g. an ability to use Google with more than your average skill, literature database searching skills, time management and writing skills, but when it comes to actually going beyond that boundary of the known into the unknown the expert is the individual concerned. So it is no good coming to a central service and expecting them to know exactly what your computing needs are. The person who decides what those needs are is you the researcher.

That means that for learners, a centralised computing facility can provide a fairly standard desktop PC that can be used by multiple users. That desktop PC may also allow you to link to more specialist machines where you can run specific packages that are part of what your course expects you to use. That is relatively neat and tidy.

First with researchers they really should not have a standard machine set up, their main computer should thus be their own machine not a shared one. They may purchase it themselves or their department may purchase it for them and it need not necessarily be high spec, although it is wrong to think that high spec is for science and engineering while low spec is for science and arts. The latest version of NVivo a qualitative software package has a higher spec than SPSS a package widely used by quantitative researchers. When you look at this as a computer person it is how they should be, NVivo does a lot that is technically more difficult than the complex mathematics in SPSS e.g. it is far more resource intensive from the computers perspective to play a video than it is to invert a matrix.However the SPSS user is often has more computer knowledge than the individual using NVivo. The old correlation which suggested that the people who needed high powered computer and the people who know about computing is beginning to breakdown and I think will continue to do so as more and more people start to use computers not just for numbers. Numbers are easy for computers to handle, other things are far more difficult. What is important is the responsibility for running that computer remains with the researcher. This also means that Doctoral Research Scholarships should include money for a computer that would be satisfactory for the student to carry the research on.

Second, central services are not going to buy all the software a researcher needs. Central Services might well buy licenses for research software where the software is widely used (something around ten departments asking for it, spread over at two faculties) and the central purchase of the software cuts the cost for the whole University. So check what is provided, as a rule if a piece of software has central support then you will get more support if you run into difficulties. However if what is centrally provided is not what you want, or does not work for you, please feel free to do your own investigation.  If you want advice about software then it may well be a good idea to talk to someone from central services who may be able to tell you what to look for even though funding is unlikely to be forthcoming. The one things a central service computer department has is a lot of people who know a lot about computers in various ways.  We also have a lot of people with a lot of diverse interests.  Actually cost is becoming less of an issue with the amount of Open Software available. You may well find what you are looking for, for free, however you still need them machine to run it on.  The other thing is to realise that if you do not like a standard offering e.g. Word there is no reason why you must have it on your PC and why you might not have Open Office instead. Central Services do not give this sort of freedom to learners.

We also are providers of infrastructure that you use. You may buy the PC on your desk but the wires or wireless signal that connects it to the network comes from central services.  Every time a researcher today reads a journal article by downloading it to their computer rather than walking over to the library and photocopying it they are using central computing services. We make provision for email and other methods of making contact with colleagues through the internet and may provide collaborative spaces where you can collaborate online. We certainly have people with experience of developing such spaces whose knowledge can be tapped into. If you are interested in such a space then it might well be worth talking to us. This is the sort of thing that can often come as an off shoot of our provision for learners. We also provide shared space for department which you may well use and if you want space to make a good backup for your data then please come and talk with Central Services as we can do more than you would thing and the prices are dropping. In other words do not leave data backup to chance. Central services also provide access to large computing facilities both at this University and in wider academia. This is again because doing this on a cooperative level saves money! That said there are often charges for the use of these services but they are often built into the research bids when they go out.

It might surprise you the tone of the last two paragraphs, the initiative on the whole remains very firmly with the researcher. We are not going to hunt you out and ask about your research computing needs, you have to come to us with those needs and then we will see if we can help you with them. If you know at the bid stage that you are going to need significant support, be collecting large archives or need to store or release online research outputs, then it really is a good idea to talk to us before the bid goes in.  It makes more things possible and will allow you to properly fund this sort of thing.

In the end central services computing support to researchers is not really that of a provider but of a facilitator with the researcher firmly in the driving seat. If you like the important thing to remember is it is the researchers job to pull not central services job to push. As a general rule the more you make a conscious effort to approach us about queries the more we are able to help.