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Minutes of Meetings:
January 30, 2002; Steinmetz 237, 2:45 pm

Present:  Batson, Boyer, Keller, Klein, McFadden, Sener, Traver

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Review of last meeting's minutes

1. Intellectual Property policy - next steps.  Tom McFadden reported on his meeting with the FEC on Friday, January 25.  We will invite Bob Wells from the FEC to join us next week and discuss how to move the policy to completion.

The following links refer to documents relevant to our debate, and helped inform Tom M. in drafting an IP policy for Union:

• Union College's patent policy, from the Faculty Manual.
• Draft of Stevens Institute of Technology Intellectual Property Rights policy.
• Article on Stevens Institute's Property Rights policy from Educause
• Article on Stevens Institute's policy from the Chronicle of HE.
• AAUP Statement of Copyright.
• The AAUP Distance Education and Intellectual Property page.

2. Information/Technical literacy.  Is it time to re-examine if and how Union should adopt a literacy policy?  Review the final report of the Tech Lit committee from Spring 2000: http://www.union.edu/PUBLIC/ECODEPT/kleind/comp/techlit-rec.htm

Middle States has written a new document: Characteristics of Excellence in Higher Education.  Tom M. has made presentations on this subject, and he distributed copies of a PowerPoint presentation on the subject of Information Literacy.  The key point is that IL is a curriculum issue, and is not separate from content.  It cannot be taught or achieved in a vacuum.

John B. said that at some level, we should be able to identify skills that we want students to have, and to be able to have a check list to indicate that students can demonstrate specific skills.  As in 2000, we realized that drawing up a list of skills would be hard, and that applying the skills was probably more important than demonstrating them out of context.

We considered surveying Department Chairs to try to discover:

• What do you (or does your Department) consider the most important aspects of technical (or intellectual) literacy?
• What do your department do to promote this (your previous definition)?
• Does your department assess this? 
• What would your department do to improve this? 
• What could or should the college do to improve this?

Diane K mentioned that there is a new version of TekXam (shorter), and a study guide funded by ATT. For more info, see: http://www.tekxam.com/. Perhaps we can pilot this exam among our U*STAR students.

The meeting adjourned at 3:25

next meeting: February 6, 2002, 2:45, Steinmetz 237

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