Report as presented to Representative Assembly on March 19th: 1) The committee looked over the Information Technology Organizational Structure produced by the Technology Task Force. The committee recommended a number of changes in the draft, especially concerning the number of proposed new directors, wording changes making it clear that a major responsibility of the new Chief Information Officer on campus would be for effective communication and long-term planning, and including a rationale for the operating expenses shown in the proposed plan.
2) The committee completed its final draft of the Distance Education Policy, and recommends that Faculty Assembly review the document and propose steps to be taken to launch policy. Full text of this document will be distributed to faculty representatives, to be considered at a future meeting after reps. have had time to read it. Other faculty may acquire the document from Doris Carey, School of Education.
3) Committee Chair Doris Carey gets approval for a memo to be sent to VCAA Pierce concerning questions and recommendations of our committee to allow computing services to better serve faculty. Major recommendations include 1) that full access to campus networks and software licenses be extended to faculty offices; 2) that faculty computers be upgraded to a level at least equivalent to the hardware available to students; 3) and that the campus email system be upgraded to a more user friendly rich-text system (such as Outlook Express or Netscape Mail) to replace the antiquated command-driven structure of Pine. Computing Services has indicated that they are looking into installing Netscape Mail or Outlook Express as a university-wide email reader (with Pine still available for those who want to access it). We are encouraging VCAA Pierce to support such a change.
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Report as presented to Representative Assembly on Feb. 12th: 1) Email motion (see full text below) to be presented to Rep. Assembly at next meeting. 2) Network Access by Faculty: We will prepare a brief proposal to the Vice Chancellor explaining shy faculty require access from their offices to the network and the software that students use. For example, students use Office 97 (PC) and 98 (Mac) while faculty still have older versions. Faculty have no budgets to update titles every few years. Discussion ensued on metering software, which works for some packages but not others. Faculty frustrated that they can't access basic programs such as Word 97 and Excel on their office computers without buying a license for themselves. 3) Distance Ed: Members of ACPC are still hard at work on Distance Education policy draft. Many suggestions have been received, but it's not clear whether they require new policies or are changes to proposed policies. 4) Doris will follow up on changing the "Reply to All" default to "no" rather than "yes" to try to cut down on accidental "reply to all" postings on email. 5) Library Expansion: questioni as to why computers are being moved from other buildings to the new Library. Will construction funds be used to replace computers that are moving? Or are the computers being moved out of Dwire no longer of use to Business Students.
The Academic Computing Policy Committee requests that the Faculty Representative Assembly consider the following motion at the February 12th meeting. MOTION Recommended, that the all-faculty email list-the "faculty-l" list-be divided into two lists. A. The first, to be comprised of the current faculty-l list, will be reserved for official academic and administrative announcements, and will be used for faculty elections. In the interests of the timely distribution of information, all faculty will be required to receive messages from the faculty-l list. Decisions as to what is appropriate for the list shall be at the discretion of the faculty users, and subject to no restrictions other than those previously issued by university email regulations. Messages that involve discussion and opinion should be sent to a second list, the "faculty-d" list. > B. The second, a new "faculty-d" list, will be set up in the manner of a listserv exchange. All faculty will be "subscribed" to the listserv; those faculty who do not wish to participate in "faculty-d" will have the option of unsubscribing from the listserv.
The "faculty-d" list will be open and available as a free, unmoderated forum for discussion of all issues deemed appropriate by the participants. The listserv will send messages automatically, with no intervening moderator, and will run in such a way as to best facilitate threaded discussions organized by subject heading. C. Email policy guidelines previously established by university guidelines shall regulate both lists (see guidelines at http://www.cusys.edu/~policies/General/email.html). D. The Faculty Representative Assembly recommends that the Academic Computing Policy Committee draft a guidelines statement, to be distributed over the faculty-l list, that advises faculty on the appropriate division of messages to the "faculty-l" and "faculty-d" lists. Responsibility for appropriate posting, however, will always lie with the individual poster. Individual discretion and voluntary self-policing shall be the only means used to guide appropriate use of the lists. NOTE: reasoning for motion from the Academic Computing Policy Committee (not part of the official motion): Recent email discussions have again raised the issue of how best to use the faculty-l list. At present, many faculty globally delete some or all faculty-l messages, impairing the ability of the list to serve as a means for the efficient distribution of messages. At the same time, faculty concerns about censorship and freedom of speech are of course of first importance. The Academic Computing Policy Committee recommends the solution above not as a total panacea, but as a means to enhance the use of email both for the wide and efficient distribution of information AND for the furtherance of discussion and free speech. The faculty-l list serves the purpose of providing campus-wide, quick, easy, and wide distribution of announcements of all sorts, administrative communications, notices of talks and special events, and may also be used for faculty elections and for the administration of Administrative Performance Appraisals. The faculty-d list will provide a means for the better and more productive exchange of discussion and opinion. Because it will not be mixed in with announcements and official communications, threaded discussions organized by subject headings provided by the participants will allow participants to follow particular lines of conversation. Faculty who wish to opt out of discussion/opinion exchanges, moreover, will be able to do so by simply sending an "unsubscribe" command to the list. Those who do subscribe to the list will have a free, unmoderated, and more constructive means to exchange views and opinions. The recommendations above, in other words, address the concerns of all the participants in the recent email debates. The recommendations allow for efficient information distribution to all faculty, protect freedom of speech, and indeed further campus community by separating out messages that are in fact very different in nature from each other, thus reducing the "signal-to-noise" ratio noted by many faculty in the current system of email. Many other universities, including Colorado College, have divided up email exchanges in very similar ways, and they have been shown to work effectively and to promote freedom of speech and increase a sense of campus community. > >Submitted by: Paul Harvey. Thursday, Feb. 4th, 1999.
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Meetings of the minutes of October 1, 1998 Breckenridge 5102 - 10 a.m. - 12 noon. In attendance: Doris Carey (Chair), Tom Huber, Lee Becker; (10:00 am) Ed Chow, Morgan Shepherd 1. Task Force The Task Force is preparing a white paper for distribution to faculty and staff. Tom will report on the dates and procedures when the paper is ready for distribution. No response yet from the Chancellor regarding the current Task Force draft on the structure of Technology Services. 2. Distance Education A number of issues arise from discussions about on-line courses. Among the questions that weve received are: What is each units policy on compensation (regular teaching load or overload) for on-line classes? Do faculty members feel the extra load is worth taking on? Will courses fit within the current semester structure? What Intellectual Property Rights policies exist, and will system-wide policy deal with new issues? Do classes taken on line transfer into regular programs? Action items: Doris will schedule a Distance Education session to share information from the Washington DC seminar; Doris will prepare a list of items for discussion that the committee will redraft and propose as policy. 3. E-mail changes Lee reported that some problems have arisen with e-mail access from home. The problems have to do with passwords that stop working. Lee has contacted the help desk 4 weeks ago and has received no reply. (Update: Lee e-mailed Jerry Wilson who is now investigating the problem.) 4. Members reported that no problems have come up with regard to NT accounts. Everything is going smoothly and students are making use of their accounts. 5. We have agreed to avoid writing policy on the appropriate use of widely distributed e-mail (such as messages to faculty and staff lists). Instead, we will write guidelines. One suggestion was that the guidelines not be used to prop open office doors. :-) Faculty feedback will be sought prior to wide distri-bution. Work on guidelines will follow policy on Distance Ed. 6. Intellectual Property Rights; some members of the ACPC have signed up to attend a focus group meeting with system personnel on October 27. We will take up issues and concerns at our November meeting. 7. Question for Jerry (under Old Business): May we have a list of campus software licenses for the network? Wed like to know which titles are available, which licenses have been renewed, and which have been discontinued. 8. Another question for Jerry (under Old Business): Will it be possible to have class lists with student e-mail accounts generated for faculty (to avoid having to type in a class list ourselves)? 9. Question from Ed: Do software licenses prohibit faculty from accessing these titles from their offices if they use the software for classroom instruction? Next Meeting: Thursday, November 1
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Meetings of the minutes of October 1, 1998 Breckenridge 5102 - 10 a.m. - 12 noon. In attendance: Doris Carey (Chair), Tom Huber, Lee Becker; (10:00 am) Ed Chow, Morgan Shepherd 1. Task Force The Task Force is preparing a white paper for distribution to faculty and staff. Tom will report on the dates and procedures when the paper is ready for distribution. No response yet from the Chancellor regarding the current Task Force draft on the structure of Technology Services. 2. Distance Education A number of issues arise from discussions about on-line courses. Among the questions that weve received are: What is each units policy on compensation (regular teaching load or overload) for on-line classes? Do faculty members feel the extra load is worth taking on? Will courses fit within the current semester structure? What Intellectual Property Rights policies exist, and will system-wide policy deal with new issues? Do classes taken on line transfer into regular programs? Action items: Doris will schedule a Distance Education session to share information from the Washington DC seminar; Doris will prepare a list of items for discussion that the committee will redraft and propose as policy. 3. E-mail changes Lee reported that some problems have arisen with e-mail access from home. The problems have to do with passwords that stop working. Lee has contacted the help desk 4 weeks ago and has received no reply. (Update: Lee e-mailed Jerry Wilson who is now investigating the problem.) 4. Members reported that no problems have come up with regard to NT accounts. Everything is going smoothly and students are making use of their accounts. 5. We have agreed to avoid writing policy on the appropriate use of widely distributed e-mail (such as messages to faculty and staff lists). Instead, we will write guidelines. One suggestion was that the guidelines not be used to prop open office doors. :-) Faculty feedback will be sought prior to wide distri- bution. Work on guidelines will follow policy on Distance Ed. 6. Intellectual Property Rights; some members of the ACPC have signed up to attend a focus group meeting with system personnel on October 27. We will take up issues and concerns at our November meeting. 7. Question for Jerry (under Old Business): May we have a list of campus software licenses for the network? Wed like to know which titles are available, which licenses have been renewed, and which have been discontinued. 8. Another question for Jerry (under Old Business): Will it be possible to have class lists with student e-mail accounts generated for faculty (to avoid having to type in a class list ourselves)? 9. Question from Ed: Do software licenses prohibit faculty from accessing these titles from their offices if they use the software for classroom instruction? Next Meeting: Thursday, November 1, 10 am - 12 noon. Please send a substitute if you cannot attend.Thursday, September 17, 1998, 9:30 a.m.
Present: Doris Carey (Chair), Tom Huber, Paul Harvey, Morgan Shepherd, Jerry Wilson, Sharon Stevens (guest)
1. Tom Huber reported on progress by the Technology Task Force. Discussion priorities have centered around the organizational framework for Technology Services. Richard Blades proposal came up before the Task Force, but was not adopted as written. Other campus (system and peer institutions) organizational structures were examined. Release of a suggested organizational model awaits a response from the Chancellor.
2. Jerry Wilson reported on the work of the Y2K Committee which has been convened this month. A report of critical and non-critical systems by each campus department is due 12/15/98.
3. Sharon Stevens filled us in on her work in the Teaching Technology Center. The faculty survey has been distributed. She also explained the function of ATLAS, Boulders alternative to the Technology Roundtable concept.
4. The ACPC discussed the continuing priority of obtaining off-campus (out-of-state) access to e-mail (see later follow-up from Jerry Wilson; this capability will be in place later this year).
5. New Business: Committee members voted to include Sharon Stevens as an ex officio member of the ACPC. Unanimous.
6. Future Meetings: According to members present and requests by members who were unable to attend, our best opportunity to meet would be the first Thursday of each month from 10 a.m. until 12 noon. (Note that we will meet for 2 hours once a month this year, compared with 1 ½ hours twice a month last year.)
Adjourned 11:15 a.m.