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Academic
Computing Steering Committee
(AcCSC)
Minutes of Meetings:
March 17, 2004
Review of last
meeting's minutes
Meeting held in the
conference room of the newly-renovated ITS.
1. Internet
Connection. Union will be upgrading its internet
connection with a second line to a second vendor, to try to prevent future
outages. The new line will be either 6, 12, or 18 mbs. The
cost will be reasonable, and the vendor will provide a level 3 switch.
2. Alden Trust.
The College will apply to the Alden Trust to support the creation of
additional electronic classrooms in the new House System.
3. Laptop Policy.
Fuat is concerned that not all faculty know about, and are taking
advantage of the laptop policy. There are several issues for faculty
and ITS: since laptops are more expensive, more fragile, generally
less powerful, and have a shorter lifespan, there are hidden costs to ITS
-- how often do they have to be replaced, and how will ITS deal with a
smaller stream of machines to recycle to other uses? The ITS budget
and endowment income is not enough to replace all campus machines (~1400)
even every 4 or 5 years, now. For faculty, there are issues of
insurance.
4. Spam issues.
What can be done?
5. ITS report.
-
There are two new electronic classrooms.
Humanities 112 is a full classroom, which cost about $40K to set up; and
Humanities 019 is a new type of room, with no computer (~20K). It is
designed for faculty to bring in a notebook.
-
The RIAA continues to crack down on
downloading of movies and music. Software firms are also going after
illegal file trading. Tom. M., our copyright officer, is monitoring
legal developments.
-
The wireless network is expanding on campus.
See the ITS wireless resource page,
http://www.union.edu
-
This summer, again, ITS, through the Office of
Curricular Design, will support develop of faculty IT projects. Last
summer, 13 faculty participated. Kesheng Yu has developed an
online database
of how faculty use technology in teaching.
-
Equipment in some of the electronic classrooms
has been upgraded.
-
Faculty are beginning to experiment with web
logs (blogs). Mary Mar has been looking at using blogs in writing
assignments. See
http://weblog.union.edu
-
Conan, the last VMS machine (library) has been
retired/shot.
-
For your
information, the ITS winter newsletter is online at: http://www.union.edu/ITS/ACAD/ACADNEWS/update0204/index.html
6. Proceedures. Some questions
for future meetings.
- Meeting (in)frequency. Dave Cossey has
suggested twice a term, and that sounds good to me.
- Membership
-- we need to clarify divisional and student membership.
- Meeting location. I suggest the new ITS
conference room.
- Food. I suggest that the meetings
include lunch.
- Time. Thursday 12:15-1:30 looked like
they should work.
7. Future agenda items.
- Hardware and software standardization
- RIAA lawsuits
- SPAM and filtering – gateway solutions
Virus attacks and firewalls; security and chat
- Outsourcing Classroom design
- Administrative systems (online
registration)
- Internet 2 and internet bandwidth
- Mail attachment size
- Mail retention policies
- Blackboard upgrades
- Response time, and timeouts on web
advising
8. Links of
interest. ECAR has just released two of its
research studies. Your institution does not need to be an ECAR subscriber to
access these.
Some of you might be interested in the
article that appeared on CNET News.com about the lawsuits that the
Recording Industry Association of America has brought again students at
three universitites for file-swapping on their local networks.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-995429.html
Have any of you written a formal policy
which would protect your university against liability in allowing students
to swap files? If so, would you be willing to share that document? I am
trying to put together a formal statement/policy.
We allow students to file-share on our LAN
(because we have to with the nature of our network) and we have a packet
shaper that restricts students ability to share over the Internet to a
small amount of bandwidth.
- Here are summary statistics from a
listserv question on e-mail sizes:
Awhile back, I solicited information on the
message size allowed at our institutions for e-mail. Here is what I
received in summary:
- 14 institutions responded - Total Message
Size (including attachments) varies from 300KB to 20MB. - Average Message
Size allowed is 7.7MB - Raw data distribution: < 1MB 1 institution 2MB 1
5MB 4 8MB 3 10MB 3 12MB 1 20MB 1 - No institution that responded offered
unlimited message size - Use of Zip utility, ftp, and web-access (i.e.,
put it on a web server and give the recipient a URL to retrieve it) were
the means suggested by several for sending larger-than-limit files. - Some
linkage between size limit and the size of standard user mailbox quota
cited. - Casey Green of the Campus Computing Project sent along this
related, additionally useful information:
"The Campus Computing Project has addressed
the issue of email attachments in the 2002 and 2003 surveys. Date from the
fall 2003 Survey: -- 60 pct of the participating institutions report
limiting the size of email attachments (by sectors, the high is 69 pct in
public universities; low is 48 pct in community colleges) -- across all
sectors, among the institutions that do impose limits on attachments, the
mean file size cap is 1.4 MB.
The 2003 survey also has data on the max.
size of student web sites on campus services: mean = 272 MB (high mean was
867 in private four year colleges; Low mean was 51 MB in public research
universities."
Source: Campus Computing 2003 p. 24 (bottom
of the page)
Thanks to all who responded. -Brian Brian
D. Voss Associate Vice President for Telecommunications Office of the Vice
President for Information Technology & CIO Indiana University
Next meeting: to be
determined. |
