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Minutes of Meetings:
October 15, 2003

Present: Bauman, Cossey, Klein, Keller, Lesh, McFadden, Traver

Review of last meeting's minutes

1. Junk Mail.  We all agree that junk mail and pop-up windows are annoying, but there is no easy, fool-proof way to avoid them.  Several of us have used projects like Stopzilla, MailWasher, Mozilla Firebird, AdAware, and Spam Assassin, with varying degrees of success.  Note that none of these products is officially supported by ITS.

2. Viruses.  The recent virus outbreak is pretty much under control.

3. Teaching with Technology.  There is a lunch talk tomorrow (Thursday, Oct. 16) featuring three users of Blackboard. 

• Linda Almstaed, Computer Science, Collecting assignments electronically with Blackboard in Introduction to Computers (Digital Drop Box vs. Assignment Manager [New in Blackboard 6] )

• Natasha Anthony, Kristin Bidoshi, Modern Languages, Blackboard Discussion in the Beginning Level Russian Language Classroom

• Nixi Cura, Visual Arts, streamline and make more visually appealing the Blackboard-based syllabus of AAH 70, Asian Garden Design.  An overview of the course materials available through Blackboard, as well as a mid-term summary of the students' access and application of those materials.

4. Central Scheduling.  What should the policy be regarding rooms traditionally under the control of one office or department?  Many departments have rooms integral to their programs, which arguably should remain under their own control.  Kathryn suggested that there should be at least three categories:  Rooms completely open to scheduling and rooms restricted to individual departments at the two extremes, and rooms for which one office or department has priority (and scheduling authority) in between.  The issue will be to identify the categories.

5. Staffing and budgets.  As the number of electronic classrooms grows with the addition of the house system seminar rooms, and the possibility of one more full electronic classroom, concerns were expressed about the ability to satisfactorily staff and maintain those rooms.  Furthermore, as the number of rooms grows, so does the demand to use electronic rooms.  This has led to an increase in the demands of Media Services to bring electronic equipment to non-electronic rooms.

We discussed the problem, but did not really come up with a silver bullet to solve it.

6. Possible speaker.  Dave C. suggested that Daniela Rus from Dartmouth might make an interesting EE/EpE/CT speaker, on the subject of sensor networks.

October 29, 2003, 2pm, Stmz. 203.

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