UCIT Committee

Newcomb Hall, Room 481
May 4, 2007

Kirk gave some updates:

  • Promoting attendance at the "New Horizons" workshops on May 21 - May 24; check out the schedule of offerings - especially Ed Berger (Mechanical Engineering) who uses a range of "cool stuff" in his teaching.
  • A new faculty committee on Course Management Systems has been meeting intensively concerning a Toolkit replacement. They are focusing on choosing a direction (open source vs. proprietary). UCIT members advocated for all Toolkit data getting migrated to whatever comes next.

During discussion of the draft committee findings for this year, a number of observations and suggestions were made, including:

  • Add a section on the Center for Computational Science and Engineering.
  • Put the Scholars' Lab in a context of multiple access points for IT services.

The SITAC Student Survey summary was reviewed. Surprises included that the majority of first-year students use Webmail as their primary email client at UVa, that almost two-thirds of the respondents never use the ROLM telephone in their dorm rooms, and that many students want faculty to communicate in new ways, e.g. podcasts and videocasts of lectures so that they could be played on iPods.

The group reviewed the formal Charge for UCIT, and then discussed how a Presidential-level committee on Information Technology could operate effectively:

  • One option that has been used in previous years is to pick an annual theme (a top-down approach).
  • Other ways would encourage topics to emerge bottom-up - for example, there seems to be a disconnect between the faculty trenches and an awareness of IT policy and strategic directions - could there be a way to connect these - and find some meeting between issues coming up from the ground-level and top-level strategies?
  • Could UCIT work on defining effective strategies for the whole university about how to educate students and faculty so that they would know what they need to know about using computers in their disciplines?
  • UCIT, whose membership is broadly representational, is useful as a sounding board - and, as a Presidential-level committee, has an institutional emphasis and can offer wise counsel and advice -- as well as an intersection with the hierarchy with respect to the allocation of resources - while retaining the option to dig into finite areas.
  • Other suggestions were to try to get re-involved in the Capital Campaign - and to look at avenues for online collaborations between teachers and researchers at UVa and other universities.
  • James said that we will start planning for next year's UCIT over the summer.

There was applause and thanks to Kirk as this was his last meeting as the UCIT Chair.

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