Getting students involved

Last week Brian Scarbeau installed a new departmental server at his school. He blogs about it here. One of the things he does that I think is great is that he involves his students in the process. They helped with the setup of the software and the migration of the data. And it turns out that having other people involved means that more people are there to remember the details from the previous setup.

I think that too often we exclude students from the process of setting up labs, servers and software. I agree that it is not something every student can or should be involved with. But when you have students who really want to learn and really want to be involved it can be a great learning (and teaching) experience.