Area 51 notes, Sept. 9, 2010

Present: Chris Norris, Mike Lynch, Mary Backus, Terry Simpkins, Shel Sax, Carol Peddie and Doreen Bernier

Guests: Curricular Technology Team – Adam Franco, Sue Driscoll, Dan Frostman, Alex Chapin and Bryan Carson

The Curricular Technology Team presented their recommendations to the area directors. Their major proposal is to create a “course hub” pulling information from the online course catalog and Banner. The hub might include a course webpage, uploaded documents, and also be used to aggregate information from other sources (e.g. blogs, wikis, etc.). The hub would first be built using links until the aggregated portion can be developed. RSS feeds to connect with MediaWiki , wordpress, and other ‘best of breed’ tools were also part of the proposal, and course folders could potentially be attached as well. The CTT needs to undertake additional research into the Learning Management System (LMS) piece of the system. The ADs thanked the team for their proposal and will consider it in more detail, promising to provide a response “very soon.” The proposal and response will also need to go to the prioritization committee.

Middlebury is considering sending unused computer hardware to MIIS to help upgrade their network systems. This raises several questions, such as the need to incorporate maintenance agreements for these units into MIIS operating budgets. Further discussions with Amy McGill and John Grunder are needed.

We also talked about what the next steps for the Google Apps evaluation project should be. We agreed to hold a meeting next week to move forward with a plan for evaluations. Chris Norris will act as Project Manager, Petar Mitrevski will head security, Mike Lynch will moderate, Mike Roy will work on privacy and Carol Peddie with handle cost analysis. Bless their hearts.

Thanks for reading,

Terry