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Academic
Computing Steering Committee
(AcCSC) Minutes of Meetings: Present: Bauman, Cossey, Davis, Keller, Klein, McFadden, Tredwell Review of last meeting's minutes. 1. Telecommunications update. Dave Cossey reported on a conference on campus telecommunications he attended. The conference was sponsored by NERCOMP. Issues raised include: the future of campus long distance; use of wireless telephony and wi-fi networks; voice over IP. Josh pointed out that students rarely use campus long-distance any more, preferring either pre-paid or credit-card style calling cards, or cell phones. It seems likely that long-distance revenues will continue to decline. 2. Pervasive Computing course. Felmon Davis distributed his syllabus, and has also created a web page with links to some relevant materials. He is still seeking speakers for the class, and we discussed some campus folks and some alums who might be candidates. Tom M. recommended a new book, Dark Ages II, When Digital Data Dies, by Bryan Bergeron. 3. Web issues. The College's bandwidth is 20 Mb/s, which is shaped to restrict excessive downloading and file sharing. Josh expressed concern that with peer-to-peer file-sharing came lots of virus infections. We agreed that blocking or virus-scanning all web traffic was not practical, but that we should renew our efforts to teach students (and faculty and staff) safe computing -- installing and keeping current their virus software. It is probably not practical to make this part of the fall Resnet blitz, because many student computers come loaded with different virus packages. We began a discussion of Department web pages -- keeping them current; making them more visible; identifying web stewards. The list of web stewards collected in 2001 is well out of date, and we need to work with the Departments and the Web Office to update it. We collected some new information which will be forwarded to the web office. Further discussion of these issues was tabled until Tom S. is with us. Josh expressed the desire that we have a unified international programs website. We all agreed that this would be desirable. An unofficial page with links to past International Programs sites is posted here. 4. Library Resources. The Library is making good progress upgrading its online catalog/back office system. The new server is installed; data conversion will take place and the transition to the new system is planned for summer and early Fall. As part of the transition, Library staff will have their computers upgraded. By Fall, the old Library server, CONAN, will be retired after many years of faithful service. Tom M. also raised the issue that there are many under-utilized online resources that the Library subscribes to. In addition, the Library web stewards have done, and are eager to continue to develop web sites specific to departments and individual courses. In particular:
We suggested that faculty using Blackboard be trained to routinely include these links on the Links page, and to remind all faculty that the Library will help collect links and build course pages. 5. ITS update. Diane K. reported:
Next meeting: January 21, 2003, 1:30 PM, ITS conference room |
© 2003 Union College, Schenectady, New York |
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