The following are the Action Items from the Academic Computing Committee meeting on February 11, 2008:
 
*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.
 
*OIT Report*
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: 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.
 
*Ad Hoc Committee Reports: EDUCAUSE Representation SubCommittee*
Kelton (Chair0 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.
 
*Ad Hoc Committee Reports: Digital Repository SubCommittee*
Mallery (Chair) sent Chapel the "Report on Digital Repositories at MSU" and Chapel responded that more deep analysis needs to be done on the nature of the materials MSU is posting and storing 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; 4) show return on investment for MSU 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.
 
*Old Business*
-Communication Methods: AJ 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.
 
*New Business*
-Election of ACC Officers: We have election of officers every two years. Kelton asked that ACC members come to the March meeting with nominations for the four open ACC positions: Chair, Deputy Chair, Secretary, and Website/Listserv Manager.
 
*Next Meeting*
The next meeting of the ACC is scheduled for Monday, March 10th, in the Library's Special Collections Room.