UCIT Committee

Newcomb Hall Room 389
September 23, 2005

Bob Reynolds opened the meeting with a brief overview of UCIT's organization and mission. The focus for this year will be a continuation of last year's goal to get more attention at the highest levels of the University for information technology's roles in support of scholarship.

Kirk Martini reported that after considerable preparation, the UCIT presentation for Casteen was postponed the evening before it was scheduled. However there was a productive meeting with Bob Sweeney earlier in the month to learn more about the development process and how it might come to include information technology (IT) needs and goals at UVa. Bob Sweeney suggested several steps: (1) have a dedicated Development officer for IT; (2) find a champion for IT in the Board of Visitors (BOV); (3) get Casteen excited about IT; and (4) assemble a group of faculty demos and presentations that could be used for campaign events. So one task for UCIT this year is to collect and screen such a group. We should also consider a presentation for Leonard Sandridge. Tim Redden suggested that it would also be useful to get a champion on each school's Development Board.

Bob Reynolds is working with the Library on a policy discussion proposal for the BOV concerning information technology and support for scholarship, and will continue to advocate for a meeting with Casteen. UCIT will work on increasing faculty participation in development activities and will finish the draft report from last year. Kirk wants to form three small sub-groups to work on each area of the report (teaching, humanities, sciences). If interested in working on one of these sub-groups, please contact Kirk.

There was discussion about the writing of the report: first, it should simply be written from UCIT's perspective without worrying about who the audience is; then, think about what sort of transformation IT could bring to UVa in 5 years and 10 years - what would be the benefits for students and faculty -- what would be the impact on UVa and on its reputation - how could we measure ourselves against our "peer groups" or "aspiration groups"?

On the topic of a cadre of faculty (and students?) who could participate in development activities and events, we should start small and see how it goes. Bob Sweeney did think that his office could fund some travel expenses for faculty presentations at Development events. So we need to get organized and start with demos for the Development Office. Ideas for packaging these demos included videotapes for the Development staff, and/or a snazzy online site where one could browse and find video clips, etc. The audience could be foundations and corporate entities as well as individuals.

A needs assessment should include bolstering for basic infrastructure - how do we address these needs too? We want to raise awareness in Madison Hall about IT needs that are part of the overall budget picture and not just for fund raising. How to market infrastructure? It might be possible to collect several projects together and find some infrastructure that is needed to support them all. Some donors are going to go for dramatic and impressive programs, others might well be interested in sustainability and infrastructure. We can include our IT resource needs as background for case statements.

Several faculty talked about how they would like to change their teaching if they knew that their students had laptops and would bring them to class. Would UVa need to require that students have laptops (and possibly eliminate public labs) in order to make this happen? Or is the existing trend for students to purchase laptops going to take care of the ownership part, and UVa just needs to further enable mobile computing so that it becomes easier and more convenient for students to bring their laptops to class? This is a track that could transform the student experience and should be taken into account by the "teaching" sub-group. It might be interesting for UCIT to hear from the faculty who have participated in the Tablet PC experiment.

Other examples of IT transforming a teaching/learning experience that were described by UCIT members include: using Google as a "fact checker" during class; using online forums so that students get feedback from every one in the class (and not just the instructor); allowing an instructor to "explore" while teaching using online resources.

To wrap up the meeting, Kirk asked if anyone had other items for UCIT to look at this year - if so, let him know. And it was suggested that we open each UCIT meeting with someone doing a 10 minute talk about their experience using IT to support their teaching and/or research - so that these experiences become shared, and possibly, inspirational to the group.