By David Morris
A New Lab
By David Morris
When you walk up the stairs to the third floor from the second, a large 10 year old painting hangs over all who enter. It is a painting of Martin Luther King Jr. and of the scenes from his life and most prominently his “dream,” a dream that the staff who worked on this project carried over to today. The Martin Luther King Teaching and Learning Center is now open, with a dream inspired from the buildings namesake.
Cecilia Wong has a dream that there wont be a single student or instructor left behind at Riverside Community College due to a lack of technological resources. With 100 percent support from the Administration and Board of Trustees, she pumped in over $12 million in construction and equipment cost with a time table of a year and eight months. The building will house roughly 600 computers with an average processing speed of two gigahertz each. The Advanced Graphics Center on the second floor will host more powerful computers separate from the others requested by instructor Mark Lehr and his students. His students can use the 27 personal computers and servers for labs.
A conference room is located on the second floor with the sole purpose of conferences, students seeking to study will be sent to the Digital Library instead.
Faculty will be able to attend technology workshops in the Faculty Innovations Center located on the second floor.
Faculty can use the center to check their e-mail, work on material for their classrooms and listen in on workshops about new software. The center also contains a centralized Distance Learning and Faculty Training. Dean of Open Campus Bob Bramucci, said that it was nice to have everybody working together in one area.
Physical, biology and chemistry sciences use the two Natural Science labs with three Macintosh computers dedicated to the science discipline. Math and Nursing departments both have dedicated rooms to their subject with software pertinent to their field and check-in computers to log lab hours. The new Writing and Reading Center is located on the first floor with separated rooms for reading and world languages and log in computers. Network Manager Mark Oliver said the building has enough wiring to stretch from coast to coast of the United States one and half times. Wong’s challenge is moving on to the A.G. Paul Quadrangle and continuing her work there.
Her goal is to connect the Digital Library, MLK building and the Quadrangle on network to swap files and stream videos directly to rooms from the library.