UCIT Committee

Newcomb Hall, Room 389
December 8, 2006

Kirk opened the meeting with a discussion of activities since the last meeting. The focus is on efforts and ways to engage mainstream faculty - with practical tools (e.g. the Toolkit), and with facilities/rooms. Newer tools include those for collaboration between faculty and students (for example, an experiment using Facebook) - and these tools could ultimately provide a system for academic networking. The University is half-way through a program to upgrade classrooms to support technology - a new effort to raise the base level of technology in all classrooms will put projectors in virtually all classrooms by Fall '07.

Topics for next semester's meetings could include: a retrospective on the Faculty Laptop Project and "lessons learned" with Karin Wittenborg, Martha Sites, and maybe a panel of support staff participants. It was also suggested that we could review the Tablet PC experiment (under Charlie Grisham, with Bob Campbell providing the primary tech support).

James initiated a discussion of the concept of workshops to introduce faculty to IT methods in scholarship. How can we be helpful on a larger scale (beyond the early adopters)? James described a Michigan program for "enriching scholarship" that started as a grass roots effort involving some IT technology folks and some faculty - and grew to a four-day event in May that included all kinds of workshops (e.g. show-and-tell, how-to, professional development) with no cost to participants and no restrictions placed on who could attend. Could we try this at UVa? How would it fit with our culture? We would need to grow it and brainstorm ways to get mainstream faculty engaged.

There was discussion about timing, topics, and formats. Various faculty workshop sponsors have experimented with offerings during J-Term - or in May (just before or after Finals). We could role something out in May and bring together various training providers. Possible topics could include how to use collaboration tools (i.e. Collab) and doing presentations using a projector.

David Germano led a discussion about how we might more effectively address the needs of faculty seeking information about using IT at UVa. On the one hand, there is an abundance of documentation about digital technology - on the other hand, there seems to be a scarcity about a particular topic of interest - and the documentation tends to be out-of-date.

In addition there is not an easy flow of information between the units providing digital services, so there is confusion as to who is doing what, who is planning what, etc. This leads to assorted floundering and reinventions of the digital wheel - and a lack of guidance to others.

One possible way to address this situation would be to provide a portal for digital-help content that would rely on the community for upkeep. David demonstrated a prototype concept that he had set up using the Collab tools. These tools provide Wiki (for collaborative development and editing of pages and content), Announcements, Chat Rooms (where one could provide "office hours"), and areas for discussion and private messages, email archives, and resources. In particular, the Wiki might provide a solution for creating and maintaining grounds-wide technical documentation.

It was recommended: that representatives from the major IT stakeholders at UVa (i.e. Library, ITC, IATH, etc.) should meet regularly (e.g. every 4 months) to discuss proposals, endorse or recommend proposals/projects, and generally keep up with what's happening in each area; and that the digital-help content producers experiment with setting up a Wiki for a broader collection of documentation, which would involve establishing an oversight committee for the Wiki (and the whole effort), and committing some staff time to this effort. This broader collection of documentation could then be made available to the whole community.

There was some discussion about using and maintaining a Wiki in an authenticated environment with version control and the ability to choose which parts are public and which are private. In order to have a collaborative community approach, it is essential to have an easy-to-use framework in which to create the content. David cited Wikipedia as an example of distributed knowledge production. In order to get wide participation, staff would probably need to be directed to participate. The rewards for contributing could be seeing that it was mutually beneficial - and receiving recognition for contributions/participation.