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Academic
Computing Steering Committee
(AcCSC) Minutes of Meetings: Review of last meeting's minutes. (Note: no meeting was held on May 2) 1. Review of electronic portfolios. Connecticut College has received support from the Davis Foundation to support the e-Portfolio project, but FIPSE turned the CC proposal down. This leaves Mellon still to hear from. A copy of the submission letter from CC to the Davis Foundation is linked to the "collection of links" page below. The initial meeting of the consortium members is scheduled for June 3. Charles mentioned that he knows someone at Wesleyan who is an enthusiastic e-Portfolio supporter. 2. Conference Reminders. Members are urged to talk up (and register for) our upcoming conference on Collaborating with Technology, May 23. The Archiving conference with David Bearman will run next Monday and Tuesday.
U*STAR students will be invited to register and attend. 3. U*STAR. We discussed U*STAR activities, and whether there was any spare capacity for new projects. Among the projects discussed [plus a few others] were:
4. Online calendar & scheduling. Discussion is continuing to determine whether the College has the financial and staff resources to purchase and implement R-25, an online central scheduling and calendar system. In the absence of constraints, the Registrar's office, the Web office, ITS, Campus Operations are all interested. To see Middlebury's implementation, click here. Dave C. has posted a sample of the reports that R-25 is capable of generating. (They require Adobe Acrobat Reader to view.) Below is a list of online calendars that Doug found at Union about a year ago. They may or may not still be active. Also there may well be new ones not on this list. If anyone has a calendar to add, let Doug know. Ideally, one central online calendar would consolidate all of these into one master calendar, with various customizable views.
[Note; Items 13 and above added May 15.]
5. Keyserver. Lloyd requested that when ITS installs Keyserver on faculty machines, it not be set to block access to Instant Messenger, unless requested. (In classrooms and labs, the default is to block IM.) Josh pointed out that Keyserver does not block all variants of IM, and in fact there is one version that does note even have to be installed locally. 6. Patriot Act. Still to be scheduled for a fuller discussion, the issue of Keyserver led to the general concern for privacy of computer and the conflicting requirement that the College could be forced to share computer records. The question is, how much should the College be responsible for backing up, and for how long should it be saved. For example, should the College be responsible for backing up people's e-mail? If not, how can individuals be enabled in doing their own backups. Josh mentioned that on VU, there is an "exclude" directory that is NOT automatically backed up, into which users can place files they do not want, or need backed up. It was mentioned that Melissa Heil, Coordinator of Support Services for International Students and Learning-disabled Students would need to be involved in privacy issues as it affected her new responsibilities to the INS. This from the Chronicle of Higher Education, May 13, 2002:
7. File Servers and NAS (Network Attached Storage). Cherrice asked whether there were any ITS plans to implement NAS or any similar system. The answer was that it is still in the "consideration" stage. She acknowledged that Division 4 has also not moved forward on a pilot NAS project. ITS and Div. 4 will discuss how and when to set up a pilot system. 8. XP upgrades. ITS plans to upgrade all of its PC classrooms and labs to XP and OfficeXP this summer (for PCs) and to OS-X (for Macs). The rationale for XP is that it boots and shuts down faster, it is more stable. The minimum standard machine on which they will install XP is a 500MH Pentium II, 256MB RAM, 20GB hard drive. Doug expressed the concern that this will instantly outdate a lot of hardware still in use in Departmental labs, in faculty offices, and in administrative use. Diane said that ITS will set the desktops on XP machines to match as closely as possible a Windows 98 machine, and will continue to support 98. Lloyd suggested that his offices would need a minimum of 5 new machines in order to upgrade to XP. 9. Notebook computer pilot expands. The IBM Thinkpad program for students (and faculty and staff) will expand campus-wide this Fall, on a voluntary basis. IBM will be making us a very attractive offer on a T-23 notebook computer, to be sold through the Bookstore. Price and feature details will be available shortly. In a memo to students in this year's Thinkpad program, Dean Bob Balmer described the new data acquisition kit that all Freshmen engineers will be using next Fall:
On the subject of notebook computers, Doug will talk with Margaret French on the issue of what is to become of her computer when she retires at the end of the year. 10. Intellectual Property. Tom M., Doug, and Kathryn will meet with the FEC next Tuesday at 4:30 to present them with the new and improved Intellectual Property Rights policy. 11. Web office update. Tom S. reported that his office is undertaking a major effort to re-design the Campus Life website, re-naming it Student Life, and providing much more information in a logical fashion, including events calendars. (See the discussion of multiple calendars above.) This project will bring the Web Office one step closer to creating multiple home pages for internal and external users -- a sort of generalized portal system. Kathryn noted that other parts of the College web were hard to find, for example student forms and faculty forms. (The answer is, from the Union home page, click Academics, then Academic Affairs, then Online Forms. Or, start at http://webadvising.union.edu, and go through the Advisor's Advisor.) 12. Survey of Departmental websites. Faculty members of the AcCSC have been surveying the Departmental websites in their division, searching for areas for improvement. There are opportunities for U*STAR help. (Click here to visit any of these Departmental web sites.)
Other Department reports will be given at the next meeting. 13. Cookies. Kathryn suggested that cookies should be served. I will check the budget. Meeting adjourned promptly at 4:30, and not
a minute before. NO MEETING MAY 23. EVERYONE COME TO THE CONFERENCE!! |
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