Ancora Imparo. Most days, I wear a bracelet engraved with that statement. And it is SO true with the NEXT Classroom. We are still learning.

Things we have learned so far and issues we are experiencing:

• The dual boot Macbook Pros are not has happy with multiple users as we had hoped. Most faculty have assigned a laptop to a student so they are using the same one over and over again but the multiple users still seem to cause problems, especially on the Windows 7/Boot Camp side of the house.
• Students are NOT good at shutting down the computer completely before they close it up and return it to the cart. This has caused several problems including:
  • locking the PC side so others cannot log in
  • causing error messages on bootup from the MacFUSE and MacNTFS-3G system preferences that were mounting the BootCamp partition to the Mac side could read/write to it. We are uninstalling the MacFUSE and MacNTFS3G system preferences because of this. We are afraid that the mounting of the disk and then constantly improperly un-mounting of the disk will cause errors that will make Win7 unstable. I really, really like the idea of being able to read/write to both partitions from either operating system but until I can find a way to make this work more reliably, we have to take that option away for now.
• Wireless networking is still a problem. This room is a testbed for wireless networking to our shared drive space as well as to all other network access for the entire classroom. It will also, eventually, be a 802.11n room but for now it is still 802.11g. The issues we are experiencing include:
  • Random inability to log into the Mac side of the laptop to the Active Directory account
  • Network access dropping after 30 minutes on about half of the laptops in any given class. We have finally identified how to fix it by disconnecting and reconnecting the wireless access but it is frustrating. The NTS staff is working very hard with us to figure it out and I certainly do appreciate their efforts. We are trying some different things from assigning a bank of IP addresses to use on the laptops so they will always have one to get (apparently the growing number of iPads and cell phones on campus with Wifi enabled are snatching up all of the pool of available wireless IP addresses, even if they are not active on them). We also have increased the “kickoff” time limit for inactivity from 30 minutes to 1 hour in hopes of helping with the issue.
• Some programs we have installed seem to only be “attached” to the account that installed it and are not propagated to all of the student accounts that are created when they log in for the first time. This has been very frustrating and has caused us to have to log into all 24 laptops a LOT to change things, install things and so on.
• The instructor station was not mapping to the instructor shared drive (called the H drive here on campus, because that is its usual assigned drive letter). We fixed that by figuring out that the Simplifi unit on the instructor station had SD and CF card readers that were snatching up the G and H drive designations and then the login script that assigned the shared drive to H would simply not work. So, we changed the assigned letter for those card readers to X and Y and all is well again!
• I had a Greasemonkey script installed called Helvireader for simplifiying the Google Reader but it was not installed on the instructor station and one of the classes is actually teaching how to use Google Reader and this caused all kinds of problems. Oops! That brought in a valuable teaching opportunity about how to disable Greasemonkey scripts!

We are also adding a new NEXT Classroom Support blog here at this site running the Quality Control theme and will try it out as a simple “help ticket” system for monitoring these problems. We’ll see how it works.

So far, though, only one laptop has totally bombed out on us and that was due to really, really mungled permissions that I probably did during an update right before the semester. I am rebuilding it and trying again!