| LINKS | Academic
Computing Steering Committee Minutes
of Meetings: Present: Batson, Boyer, Cossey, Keller, Klein, McFadden, Traver
Review of last meeting's minutes 1. Doug Klein reported on meeting with FRB on Wednesday, April 12, to discuss the memo on faculty recognition and reward. He distributed a handout based on the Middle States Self Study faculty survey indicating that both faculty at large and members of the FRB recognized the need to recognize efforts spent on "Other Teaching" and "Special Teaching Considerations", which could include efforts to effectively incorporate technology into the classroom. The FRB was supportive of these notions, while pointing out that faculty activities, whether traditional research, pedagogical research, or innovative instructional methods would be valued more highly when subject to peer review. 2. Doug Klein and Dave Cossey reported on a meeting between the Integrated Advising Working Group and the FEC. The meeting was designed to gain FEC support for bringing the advising proposal before, and gaining the support of the general faculty. FEC members were enthusiastic about the improvements to advising that a central advising database would enable, but expressed caution that faculty would not in general welcome an advising system that required substantially more advising (and training) time than faculty now spend. The advising group believes that better advising need not be time consuming, and that access to student records (by faculty and students) could make advising far more effective than currently. Implementing campus-wide access to degree audit alone would vastly improve course planning and scheduling. Doug Klein is continuing to work on the Advising web site. Comments on this site are welcome. Efforts continue to find initial and continuing funding for the new advising hardware, software, and faculty/student/staff training. 3. Doug Klein announced that he, Dave Cossey, Dwight Wolf, Judy Manchester, and John Skumurski have developed a new simplified set of budget codes which will allow the College to accurately track expenditures on technology. 4. Dave Cossey announced that OCS had received nearly twice the value of IBM equipment as in the past few years. This year's equipment gift (representing 3 times the dollar value of contributions from alums employed by IBM, or 1.5 times the value of contributions from alums retired from IBM) was about $67,000. After paying back the $6,500 in gifts that were restricted to accounts other than OCS, Dave will be to acquire about $60,000 more worth of equipment than he otherwise would have. This amounts to about 40 systems (36 desktops and 4 notebooks). 5. Dave Cossey made a presentation on OCS efforts to upgrade Union's internet connection. The College is currently in negotiations to move to a T-3 line within the next six months. We will still need to arrange for access. We will start out using only a fraction of the T-3 line (probably 6 or 9 Mbps), up from our current bandwidth provided by 2 T-1 lines (3Mbps total). 6. Tom McFadden discussed a lengthy list of topics he suggests for inclusion on the Committee's agenda. This list includes: - budgeting and planning Subject: Lafayette IT Plan Just ran into this article, which is really interesting, and
which might have some carry-over to Union. In particular, I was interested in the
ways that, like here, OCS and Library staff work together in technical training, and I was
especially interested in the use of their version of IVDS: Next meeting: |
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