Present: Eric Brewer, Robert Buchele, Glenn Ellis, Thomas Laughner, Eric Loehr, Alan Marvelli, Katwiwa Mule, Herb Nickles, Nicholas Russell, and Charles Staelin
Absent: Nicholas Howe
Guest: Kate Etzel
Minutes of November 10, 2006
The minutes of the November 10th meeting were approved as written.
Adoption of FCAP computer standards – Kate Etzel
Kate Etzel, Director of User Support Services, gave the committee a spreadsheet outlining the distribution of desktops & laptops and Dell vs. Apple requests for this year. She recommends that CET approve an upgrade on all FCAP machines to 2GB RAM which is necessary to run VISTA but stay with the current monitor size. Eric Brewer said that the Science Center is distributing new equipment with 2GB RAM and they feel that it has been money well spent. Charles noted that 9-12 new faculty would be coming in the fall 2007 and 8 faculty will be retiring, some who will want their last upgrade before leaving Smith. Kate said that she is trying to provide new machines to lecturers and Charles will provide her with a hierarchy of lecturers. She will also provide the committee with a comparison of MacBook and MacBook Pro via email. The committee agreed to upgrade FCAP machines to 2GB RAM but agreed to leave the monitor size at 17”.
Report of the Learning Spaces subcommittee
1) The subcommittee has been discussing new concepts in collaborative learning spaces, new furniture layout in existing spaces, changes that could be made to King/Scales labs, wireless technology in residence houses, and new teaching/learning spaces. They plan to visit the new learning space at Mt.Holyoke and at Olin in Boston. They would like to develop an incubator space with leading faculty who have been teaching with technology.
Report from the Director of ETS – Tom Laughner
Tom provided the committee with a draft document addressing improvements that should be made in classroom support. He asked them to review and make comments on this document. He said that Moodle has 70 courses up and running for the spring semester and that they had only had 2 problems that had been identified. Tom is in the process of restructuring ETS (Educational Technology Services) with an emphasis on teamwork and collaboration. All the position descriptions for ETS are being rewritten and now will include classroom support as part of their responsibilities.
ETS is in the process of reviewing and testing interactive white boards for campus use.
Student Pictures with class lists on Bannerweb- a request from Floyd Cheung via Nick Howe
Herb explained to the committee that this issue has been raised before but that at Smith the student photos are in the OneCard system, not Banner and to convert those photos to Banner would be a matter of scheduling staff time in Administrative Technology during a time when they are implementing ODS, Cognos reporting tools, and plan to implement Banner Xtender in the summer. Herb will explore the costs and time required to hire a consultant to work on such a conversion and then he and Bob will respond to Floyd Cheung.
Topics for Discussion – Tom Laughner
Tom said that in conversations with students he was hearing that they feel they have no outlet for bringing up issues around educational technology. The committee felt that it was worth exploring having a student representative on the committee and asked Tom to speak to the SGA president, Meg Ambrus, about identifying a student who might be interested in coming to the meetings.
Mule asked Tom and Kate if they could continue to evaluate tablets as a possible alternative for the FCAP program and they said they would.
The committee decided to cancel the January 12th meeting and hold the next meeting in February on the 9th as scheduled.
There being no further time for discussion, the meeting adjourned at 12:00 noon. The next meeting of CET will be January 9th in Stoddard Hall G4 conference room.
Respectfully submitted,
Constance McGinn, recorder