Educational Technology Committee

Meeting of 28 November, 2007

 Minutes

Present: Tim Whiteford (Chair), Susan Breeyear, Malcolm Lippert, John Payne, Bill Anderson, and Tony Richardson.

I.        Meeting was called to order at noon.

II.      Purchase of large format printer.

The committee unanimously endorsed Jon Hyde’s recommendation for the college to purchase one HP / Hewlett-Packard Designjet Z3100ps GP 44" Photo Quality, Large Format, Inkjet Printer to be located in the college print shop.  The recommendation was passed on to George Goldsworthy who will place the order. It was noted that the purchase price was under budget which allows for the purchase of paper and ink to be used in the printer.

Policy concerning the equitable use of the printer by faculty will be discussed at the next EDTech committee meeting. TW will talk with George Goldsworthy to get input into how the printer could most effectively be used.

III.     Broadband upgrade  

      Bill Anderson asked the committee to assist IT in the department’s efforts to allocate campus
      bandwidth properly. In particular the department wants to discourage illegal use while
      maintaining ample capacity for academic applications. The technology IT used to control
      bandwidth use permits the department to block certain types of traffic ( http: for example ),
      certain types of applications ( file sharing, for example ), and segregate traffic between
      academic administrative, and residential users among others. Unfortunately, the technology
      can not know if a particular packet is academic or recreational, or legal or illegal and we have
      to make assumptions based the “usual” use of a web site or application. The College currently
      has a 45 MB connection to the internet and the bandwidth allocated to students is almost
      always completely used. Bandwidth will increase dramatically to between 100MB and 150 MB  
      in the next few months increasing the need to control inappropriate use while maintaining
      access to academic resources. The dilemma for IT is how much bandwidth should be
      allocated to applications like YouTube that use large amounts of resources, have a clear
      recreational function but are also used academically. Sue Breeyear is getting some
      information from her classroom technology survey but to supplement that data TW agreed to
      send a two question survey to faculty to gauge academic use of Youtube style websites. This
      data will contribute to IT’s decisions on bandwidth for applications and hopefully strike the
      proper balance between access and regulatory compliance.

 IV.   Pedagogy Day

Pedagogy day will be held January 11th 2008. The morning will be devoted to a discussion on college curriculum hosted by CEPC. The afternoon will comprise concurrent sessions hosted by IT. Topics will be determined by EDTech committee members form a list of 35 topics submitted by Sue Breeyear. 

V.     HP mobile technology RFP

Karen Popovich expressed an interest in submitting a proposal HP for a grant related to mobile technology working with a public school that meets the HP RFP criteria. Members of the SMC Education Dept. can supply  interested faculty members with information regarding public schools that meet the HP (and others) criteria for such grants.

 

VI   Next Meeting

Wednesday January 30  at noon in St Edmunds 361

    

      Scribes of the day, Tim Whiteford, Sue Breeyear and Bill Anderson