ITRC Committee End-of Term Report
May 5, 2005
Committee Members: Brian Sturm (chair), Helen Tibbo, Jerry Saye, Kristin Chaffin, Scott Adams, Cheryl Lytle, Rebecca Vargha, Megan Winget, Rosalyn Metz, and Elizabeth Sheehy
NOTE for next year: The ITRC met several times face-to-face and conducted other business via email, but we had significant difficulty getting the entire committee together for business. It is my recommendation that we reconsider the size and composition of this group for next year’s committee assignations; a committee of Scott, Cheryl, Rebecca and a faculty member may be sufficient to ensure the administrative information sharing this committee provides. Getting 10 people together on any consistent basis is nearly impossible; I think we can “facilitate liaisons” more easily with fewer people.
We addressed many topics this year, many on an impromptu basis as they became issues, some at the behest of Scott and Rebecca:
1. We recommended a change in the Webpage architecture at SILS to move course webpages into a localized and consistent file structure for administrative ease and to facilitate potential future archiving of course material (to be discussed at future faculty meetings). We proposed – and the faculty adopted – a file structure of:
htdocs/courses/year_semester/inlscoursenumber_sectionnumber. Further issues to address in this area include: archiving Blackboard content, archiving class webpages (intellectual property issues), limiting access to these files (if faculty don’t want world access to them), and limiting access to older versions of courses (i.e., prior to 3 years) to avoid misinformation on our website. Older versions may already be in the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/). We hope to slowly move all course webpages into this file structure.
2. We devised an FAQ on the laptop requirement to help deal with student questions and complaints. Please see document attached to this email message for the final version.
3. We discussed (and Cheryl instituted) short training emails about certain software in the lab that might be of interest to faculty. She interviewed several faculty about their IT needs and devised a short “help” document on AFS to send out. The committee (in whatever form it takes) may want to consider this again next year, as it was successful but not wildly so. Are the faculty interested in ongoing IT Tips-of-the-Week via email?
4. Scott brought his staffing concerns (and budget concerns) to the committee. He badly needs people to help with the ongoing support and expansion of our IT infrastructure. At the top of the list are: 1) a systems administrator (permanent, preferably full-time but part-time is okay, and not a student) who can support academic computing for Unix/Windows/and PC computing; 2) a web programmer (perhaps reporting to –or certainly working closely with – Scott, Wanda, and Shawn) to maintain and update and potentially redesign our web presence; 3) a systems administrator to support SILS research computing, perhaps supported by grants.
5. We discussed ongoing support for the Ph.D. computers and agreed on the recommendation that support for these machines be phased out over a 3-year period with no new upgrades to these machines. This is in response to continued budget cuts, but our support for the idea focused primarily on decreasing the IT administrative burden, promoting use of laptops and wireless technologies by Ph.D. students, and creating a more flexible space in the Ph.D. office to promote collaboration and interaction among the students in this space (attention will need to be given to those students who are teaching and use the privacy of their cubicle for student meetings). We suggest this issue be brought up next year with the Ph.D. committee and the Ph.D. students, but budgetary constraints may force this phase-out in any case.
6. We facilitated the conversation about the use of the S-4 space for storage/student use; we worked with Scott (though no policy was produced) to think about domain names for ILS research initiatives (and would recommend that all projects be under the ils domain rather than personal or project domains if they are connected with ILS research and personnel); and we discussed the possibility for supporting Macintosh hardware and software, but came to the conclusion that we have neither the resources nor the staff to do so at this time as the IT staff is stretched as far as they can go.
7. Finally, we discussed the potential future committee structure (please see beginning note). We considered an ad hoc “IT Evaluation Committee” to assess the quality of service rendered to faculty and staff that might have a faculty/administration/student membership. We also considered a standing committee for directors to communicate with faculty about administrative issues.