Academic Computing Committee
Meeting Minutes
February 11, 2008
Members Present:
University Senate Representative: R. Wolfson
Faculty Representatives: J. Alvares [Univ. Senate Rep.], C. Du [CSAM Faculty Rep], E. Renfro-Michel [CEHS Faculty Rep.], R. Subramanian [proxy for SBUS Faculty Rep], S. Shapiro [Library Faculty Rep.].
Administrative Representatives (Academic Deans): M. Mallery [Library Administrative Rep.], A.J. Kelton [CHSS Administrative Rep.], R. Salomon [SBUS Administrative Rep.], S. Shappell [Graduate School Administrative Rep.], P. Kahn [proxy for Associate Vice President for Information Technology]
Non-voting Members Present: E. Chapel, OIT
Guest: M. Heller, J. O’Brien.
Absent: S. Sotillo [CHSS Faculty Rep.], S. Poger [CEHS Administrative Rep], A. Pemberton [CART Faculty Rep.], S. Garber [CART Administrative Rep.], J. Youn [CSAM Administrative Rep.], T. Devlin [Academic Coordinator of Education Computing Network], D. Stevens [Undergraduate Student Rep], A. Mohiuddin [Graduate Student Rep.], VACANT [Undergrad. Student Rep.]
Presiding: A.J. Kelton, Chair Pro Tem
Reporting: M. Mallery, Secretary
Distribution: ACC Web at http://frontpage.montclair.edu/acc/
Convened: 3:04 p.m. [University Hall Courtyard Lounge]
Adjourned: 4:20 p.m.
1. Call to Order: The meeting was called to order at 3:04 p.m.
2. Minutes: Members approved the ACC Meeting Minutes of December 10th.
3. Announcements: Chapel announced that New Jersey Connected, a statewide initiative for broadband services, will hold a Broadband Summit on March 11th at the NJN studios in Trenton with videoconferencing.
Shappel announced that the MSU Graduate School has a soft launch for a new Live2Support Chat feature on their Web site for prospective students to reach out and contact a representative at the Grad. School at: http://www.montclair.edu/graduate/ . Kahn noted that Wimba has a chat feature called "Pronto" that MSU OIT will be launching soon as well.
Kahn announced that there will be a meeting to talk about he MSU iTunes U. initiative on Feb. 27th at 1PM in UH5009.
Kelton announced that CEHS ADP Center for Learning Technologies has an island in Second Life adjacent to CHSS Island, and the Library building is currently being built with access to online resources for the MSU community with a group of librarians.
4. Reports
• Chair's Report: Kelton, Chair Pro Tem, has no report from Kasner.
• OIT Report: Chapel reported that the Bell Tower Initiative is currently the main focus for OIT staff. MSU has received two bids from Peolesoft/Oracle and SCT/SunGard/Banner. Currently, OIT received BOT approval to engage evaluation services from Gartner. The ACC can look forward to demonstrations of the bid systems before term ends.
The implementation phase of the Bell Tower Initiative is scheduled for July, 2008, and it will begin with the MSU financial system.
Kelton asked for an update on the campus alert system discussion from the December 10th ACC meeting. Chapel noted that OIT has worked through performance issues and done other tests of the emergency alert system, especially during the protracted power outage on campus a couple of weeks ago. Also, Chapel said that OIT corrected the alert email problems with spam blocking by blacklisting the Rave email services.
Heller asked if there was a guarantee of a five-minute response for emergency notification because during the power outage in the past week this was not the case. Chapel asked that ACC members send him the data if there are complaints about response time on the Rave email emergency notification system.
• Ad Hoc Committee Reports:
a) Learning Management Subcommittee (LMS):
Kahn (Chair) reported that at the Dec. 17th meeting, they discussed issues with the BlackBoard upgrade. They gave out links to three course management systems: Moodle, Epsilen and Othello. LMS will be looking at the technical specifications, programmer support, and training as well as migration requirements from BlackBoard for each system. MSU will run small pilots and evaluate as we did when we first decided on BlackBoard as the course management system for MSU. The first pilot project is scheduled for Summer, 2008.
Kahn also noted that there will be an Epsilen presentation on February 19th in University Hall, and everyone is invited.
b) EDUCAUSE Representation SubCommittee:
Kelton (Chair) reported that he hasn't heard from SBUS and CART yet on their choice of representatives. Salomon said he would forward the SBUS information to Kelton.
c) Digital Repository SubCommittee:
Mallery (Chair) sent Chapel the "Report on Digital Repositories at MSU." Chapel said that more deep analysis needs to be done on the nature of the materials MSU is posting and storing in digital repositories and hoping to reuse, including the different formats and metadata needs. Chapel offered the expertise of OIT to assist the Digital Repository SubCommittee to go to the Faculty Senate with 1) best practice models; 2) applications and technical specifications needed for a campus digital repository; 3) the evidence of what we're doing now; and 4) a show of the return on investment for an MSU campus-wide institutional repository system. Chapel pointed out that these tasks should be completed within the next month since April is the time for university budget proposals.
4. Old Business:
a) Responsible Computing Policy Subcommittee: Wolfson (Chair) said they need a new faculty member for the Committee. He said that he had received no comment and asked Chapel if OIT had received feedback on the policy. Chapel said that he had received some, but less than he had expected. Chapel noted that the Policy is open to change and adjustment. Meanwhile, four other institutions have asked to use the MSU policy as a model.
b) Communication Methods: Kelton reported that he set up the Classroom Technology Community in BlackBoard with Patty Kahn. He asked that ACC members go to BlackBoard at: http://montclair.blackboard.com
and join the Community and send a note out so that the discussion can begin. When we have enough topics, Kelton said that he will break up sub-discussions on different threads.
On the question of RSS feeds, Kelton said that he will write up an email about RSS feeds for distribution.
5. New Business:
a) ACC Elections: Kelton noted that the ACC holds elections for its officers every two years. For the next meeting, Kelton asked that the ACC members come with nominations for the four ACC open positions:
*Chair,
*Deputy Chair,
*Secretary, and
*Web/Listserv Manager.
b) Rave Wireless Classroom Uses: Alvares noted that at the most recent Senate meeting Patty Kahn and Kathy Ragan gave a demo of the Rave wireless device as an educational device for making classrooms more interactive. Alvares said he asked his students if they use the Rave phone, and most did not have the device with them in class.
Wolfson also said that in a sophomore class he is teaching, only five students said they used the Rave device. He noted that without a critical mass, you can’t use the device in the classroom. Wolfson recommended that there be more education for the students about the benefits of the Rave device. Kelton said he had used the device in class for polling students, and only one student did not have the device with him.
Alvares noted that perhaps the Rave wireless is not the best device for educational uses. He recalled the laptop initiative from years ago, and asked if maybe OIT could revisit the idea of requiring a laptop for every student instead. Chapel noted that the devices are not interchangeable. For example, a student is able to have the Rave cellphone in their pocket at all times, whereas a laptop would not be as portable.
Chapel noted that the Rave wireless has been in use for the past four years at MSU, and it was a truly innovative program when it started. Unfortunately, the program is not scaling well to the larger community as time goes by, and it was not originally phased in for educational use. OIT is revisiting the entire program now and evaluating it.
c) Next Meeting:
The next meeting of the ACC is scheduled for Monday, March 10th, in the Library's Special Collections Room.
6. Adjournment:
The meeting was adjourned at 4:20 PM