[4745] in Consulting_FYI
The Faculty Liaisons
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (lavin@Athena.MIT.EDU)
Thu Apr 9 15:24:15 1992
From: lavin@Athena.MIT.EDU
To: cfyi@Athena.MIT.EDU
Cc: carla@Athena.MIT.EDU, f_l@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 09 Apr 92 15:23:37 EDT
Hi, folks!
I see from the volume of recent questions passed our way lately that
our scheme to convince you guys that the Faculty Liaisons do, in fact,
know EVERYTHING in the universe was wildly successful. :)
This is just a reminder that we really mostly concern ourselves with
course-related Athena problems (allocating space for and setting up
course lockers, helping faculty fix course software, training TAs to
use OLTA and NEOS, etc.) We do have some special expertise (i.e.
maybe more experienced than most consultants) in things like Maple, C,
X, FORTRAN and sometimes LaTeX. We've helped install a lot of the
third party software, but that doesn't mean we're experts at *using*
any of it. We've all been on Athena quite a while, and so we know its
quirks and ins and outs pretty well -- think of us as reasonably
clueful users who happen to have been around a while.
So sending a random SIMULAB question our way probably isn't going to
help (we'll just suggest they go by the 11-115 and look at the
manual); we can't help someone who's looking to get Motif installed on
their laboratory workstation (we'll just send them on to the Software
Acquisitions group). We can, however, help if suddenly there are 400
MATLAB questions in the queue, and they're all asking the same thing
for some course -- we'll call the faculty member and figure out what
horrible thing got assigned by mistake. We can rack our brains to see
if there's some piece of courseware out there we know about that does
some special task someone's looking for, or get a course locker for a
TA to put problem set solutions in, or make a class mailing list, etc.
Please don't hesitate to call on us to help with things -- but please
try to make sure that they're things we *can* help on!
Thanks,
Anne & Dot & Reid
