| LINKS | Academic
Computing Steering Committee Minutes
of Meetings: Present: all members present. 1. Review of last week's minutes 1a.Internet Access. The continuing congestion on the College's internet connection is reducing productivity for all members of the campus community. While we know that the congestion is caused by recreational surfing, we are hard pressed to know what to do. Student response is that we should simply increase our bandwidth. Unfortunately, bandwidth is in fact something prospective students are actually interested in. Dave Cossey reported that additional T-1 lines cost approximately $20K from our current vendor, and he is getting additional bids. A T-3 line from our current vendor costs $330K per year, and is out of the question at this point. Tom McFadden proposed a short-run way to ease some of the congestion. In order to facilitate internet access to library materials, he will fund one additional T-1 line from the Library's technology budget. Dave Cossey will immediately begin the necessary steps to get that added capacity installed. 2. Integrated Advising Proposal.
The Committee recognizes the importance of careful planning in creating a
new advising system. We discussed six areas in which groups might be formed to help
in the planning process: Furthermore, we recognize the need for input from a variety
of sources: We need to become aware of work others have done in this field, for example, Academic Advising for Student Success: A System of Shared Responsibility," by Susan H. Frost; and Transforming Academic Advising Through the Use of Information Technology, edited by Gary L. Kramer and M. Wayne Childs, and published by the National Academic Advising Association. This will be an ongoing agenda item as we move to upgrade our advising program and the technology required. 3. Using Technology and the Promotion and Tenure Decision. We revised the letter on promotion and tenure policy. Tom McFadden and Doug Klein agreed to incorporate some information from external sources on discipline-specific policy statements before we send the letter out. Some of the resources are collected here. 4. Academic staff desktop computing needs. The policy of the Subcouncil on Academic Computing, working with OCS, was to annually establish a standard configuration for academic desktop machines. Diane Keller maintains an inventory, and we try to keep faculty and academic staff upgraded. When (as is usually the case) there are not enough new machines to go around, junior faculty have priority, since they have more riding on having adequate computing power. Dave Cossey and Diane Keller noted that at the moment, because of one staff vacancy and one illness in OCS, they would be hard pressed to be able to get new computers on order set up and installed in faculty offices. We will address this year's needs and our ability to meet them at a later meeting. 5. Technical literacy and finding homes for interdisciplinary courses. We ran out of time for this today. It will be referred to the newly-formed committee investigating the need for a technical literacy requirement at Union. Next meeting: next week, same time, same place. |
© 2000 Union College, Schenectady, New York |
|
