Thanks everyone,
Andrew Briddell
Friday, February 5, 2010
Shared Governance Committee Minutes
February 5, 2009 minutes are online in draft form at http://www.asm.wisc.edu/shared-governance-minutes-2009-10-2.html. Please email any corrections to me by Monday at 8:00 pm.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Teaching Awards Committee, Meeting 2/1/10
Prior to the meeting, committee members individually evaluated 29 nominations of UW Madison faculty for a total of 5 Teaching Awards to 10 recipients. The committee, composed of two students and four faculty, submitted preliminary scores, reviewed applications and discussed evaluations. Recipients will be notified within the next few weeks and the Awards Ceremony will be April 21, 2010. To complete responsibilities, the committee revised the committee guidelines for selection and elected a chair for the 2010-2011 year.
Lynette Studer and Roxy Godiwalla
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
January 2010 Information Technology Committee Meeting
January ITC Meeting
The full meeting minutes are available here (at the moment, they’re still in draft format, so until mid-Feb please don’t quote from them)
Updates
- The MyWebSpace upgrade has happened. There was general agreement that the new interface for finding groups is pretty lame, hidden under the icon that’s supposed to be the Sun.
- The trickiest part of the cooling upgrade for the Computer Sciences building, which includes the DoIT machine room (ie, where www.wisc.edu, wiscmail, MyUW, Learn@UW, etc all live). The computers produce so much heat that they have to be air-conditioned 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and the building gets chilled water to drive the A/C. The equipment that handled it was past its rated lifetime, and we were in danger of maxing out the cooling, so we upgraded the pipes to bring in more water, with bigger pipes.
In order to do this, we had to shut down the current cooling system so the steamfitters could cut out the old pipes and switch to the new ones. To puthis off, we shut off as much of the computing resources as possible, taking advantage of an early January lull, and with a huge collection of fans and temporary ductwork, used the outside air to cool the building. We were helped by outside air temperatures of -3 below, but even then we just barely made it. (The lack of humidity was problematic, but we apparently pulled it off.) The pictures tell some of the tale:
http://can.doit.wisc.edu/~bradshaw/cooling/ - one of the hardest things was having to switch the person on guard duty at the doors frequently given the extreme cold and the wind from the fans.
- A quick update on the “Hacker Within” student org ( http://groups.google.com/group/hacker-within ) This is a student-led group, that teaches other students who are mostly (all?) not computer science students, but still need programming in order to get their work done. Computing is becoming critical to more and more disciplines, so it’s good to see things like this springing up.
Our main agenda items were up next. We started out with an update from the library on the Hathi Trust – hathitrust.org (It’s the Hindi word for ‘Elephant’). This is related to the Google Book Scanning agreement. The HathiTrust is a collaboration between the University of California System and the CIC (The Committee on Institutional Cooperation – basically, the academic version of the Big Ten, but still with the University of Chicago). The trust serves as an insurance policy with the Google book scanning deal – they’re keeping digital copies of everything that Google scans. For now, we’re trying to stick with things that are out of copyright or were always public domain, but as much as possible, we want to make electronic access available to all of our collection, on demand. The powerpoint from the meeting has some interesting stats and facts about the Google book deal
Next we got a demo of the new Courseguide system enrollment management is developing. This is something that we should ask to have demoed in a Shared Gov meeting, and to get them to talk about some of their future plans, because some of it is pretty cool. One thing that I thought was really cool was the hope to sort of pre-create some common course plans.
Eventually, the course guide is going to get live data on what seats are open, and what sections are full versus what sections just aren’t open, and more information about the instructor. Right now it’s pretty bland, but eventually the hope is to get real professor information, a syllabus, research the professor is involved with, and hopefully some actual lectures and information about the teaching style of that class, so you can pick what class might be the best fit for your learning style.
The last thing we looked at was a report from the “Deans Working Group on Information Technology and Library Infrastructure”, but it’s still an early draft, so I’ll wait until we see a later version before going into it.
Erik Paulson
The full meeting minutes are available here (at the moment, they’re still in draft format, so until mid-Feb please don’t quote from them)
Updates
- The MyWebSpace upgrade has happened. There was general agreement that the new interface for finding groups is pretty lame, hidden under the icon that’s supposed to be the Sun.
- The trickiest part of the cooling upgrade for the Computer Sciences building, which includes the DoIT machine room (ie, where www.wisc.edu, wiscmail, MyUW, Learn@UW, etc all live). The computers produce so much heat that they have to be air-conditioned 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and the building gets chilled water to drive the A/C. The equipment that handled it was past its rated lifetime, and we were in danger of maxing out the cooling, so we upgraded the pipes to bring in more water, with bigger pipes.
In order to do this, we had to shut down the current cooling system so the steamfitters could cut out the old pipes and switch to the new ones. To puthis off, we shut off as much of the computing resources as possible, taking advantage of an early January lull, and with a huge collection of fans and temporary ductwork, used the outside air to cool the building. We were helped by outside air temperatures of -3 below, but even then we just barely made it. (The lack of humidity was problematic, but we apparently pulled it off.) The pictures tell some of the tale:
http://can.doit.wisc.edu/~bradshaw/cooling/ - one of the hardest things was having to switch the person on guard duty at the doors frequently given the extreme cold and the wind from the fans.
- A quick update on the “Hacker Within” student org ( http://groups.google.com/group/hacker-within ) This is a student-led group, that teaches other students who are mostly (all?) not computer science students, but still need programming in order to get their work done. Computing is becoming critical to more and more disciplines, so it’s good to see things like this springing up.
Our main agenda items were up next. We started out with an update from the library on the Hathi Trust – hathitrust.org (It’s the Hindi word for ‘Elephant’). This is related to the Google Book Scanning agreement. The HathiTrust is a collaboration between the University of California System and the CIC (The Committee on Institutional Cooperation – basically, the academic version of the Big Ten, but still with the University of Chicago). The trust serves as an insurance policy with the Google book scanning deal – they’re keeping digital copies of everything that Google scans. For now, we’re trying to stick with things that are out of copyright or were always public domain, but as much as possible, we want to make electronic access available to all of our collection, on demand. The powerpoint from the meeting has some interesting stats and facts about the Google book deal
Next we got a demo of the new Courseguide system enrollment management is developing. This is something that we should ask to have demoed in a Shared Gov meeting, and to get them to talk about some of their future plans, because some of it is pretty cool. One thing that I thought was really cool was the hope to sort of pre-create some common course plans.
Eventually, the course guide is going to get live data on what seats are open, and what sections are full versus what sections just aren’t open, and more information about the instructor. Right now it’s pretty bland, but eventually the hope is to get real professor information, a syllabus, research the professor is involved with, and hopefully some actual lectures and information about the teaching style of that class, so you can pick what class might be the best fit for your learning style.
The last thing we looked at was a report from the “Deans Working Group on Information Technology and Library Infrastructure”, but it’s still an early draft, so I’ll wait until we see a later version before going into it.
Erik Paulson
December 2009 ITC Meeting
The full minutes are online here, So I’ll just hit the highlights of the discussions.
ITC meetings always start off with a half hour of so of “roundups.”. In December, we talked about
-the search for a CALS CIO (Chief Information Officer) – mostly just that they were looking for someone, not much on what they’d do.
-The standard update on the lawsuit between Desire2Learn and Blackboard. The reason we care is that Desire2Learn makes the software behind Learn@UW, and if D2L lost that lawsuit the consequences could be that we’d have switch software behind Learn@UW. The lawsuit has been going on for a couple of years, and to be safe the UW developed contingency plans in case we had to switch. This wasn’t a complete waste of time – we’ve actually got a lot of colleges that prefer our backup option. Thankfully, we’re done getting these lawsuit updates as D2L and Blackboard announced a settlement.
- A cooling upgrade for the data center. More on that in the January report
- The ITC has a representative on the Campus Planning Committee, so we get standing updates from the CPC
- A security update. You may remember an incident earlier this year in Chemistry, in which social security numbers were inadvertently exposed (and likely weren’t exposed, the hackers were just using the computers to share movies, and probably never even knew there were SSNs on the machine. Still, the UW assumes that they were and acts accordingly). The concern is that we’re approaching having to spend upwards of a million dollars with software to try and defend against all of this, and it is only getting worse.
- The UW is looking at “Digital Measures” - http://www.digitalmeasures.com/ It is an online course evaluation system (ie replacing the scantron thing we fill out at the end of the semester) with some fancy reporting tools. We’re supposed to see it at a future ITC meeting, so I’m trying to keep an open mind. (There’s something to be said for better processing of this data, but once upon a time ASM managed to put it all on the web, so it can’t be that hard to do)
We then moved on to our big agenda items. The first topic was the start of reorganizing the libraries on campus, and reinterpreting the role of libraries. This might be something we’d like to discuss further, and other committees have mentioned, but the gist of it is that the libraries will be moving away from specialized libraries and collections, and towards a more centralized functional system.
Our next discussion item was titled “Reflections on a snow day” – this was about a week after the December campus closing. Some things we talked about:
- the University’s website was nearly crushed by the spike in load, as people were trying to get information about the closing. In the future, we’re going to go to a stripped-down version earlier.
- We need to clarify what it means for “campus to be closed”, particularly in regards to things that don’t physically need campus. For example, there was a lot of ambiguity for assignments that might have been due on that day. As much of the submission of homework/papers/projects is electronic, a snow day doesn’t matter. Similarly for virtual classes that meet electronically – there was no need for them to be cancelled, at at least some of them “met” as normally scheduled.
Recreational Sports Board Meeting-Jan. 26, 2010
The Recreational Sports Board met Tuesday, Jan. 26.
In the first order of business, the Rec Sports Board passed the budget for the 2011 fiscal year.
We also discussed ongoing efforts by NatUP 2010, a student organization dedicated to the renovation and expansion of the Natatorium facility. The group is currently petitioning for signatures to get the Nat construction plans on the ballot in the April 12-14 elections.
For more information, please visit www.natup2010.com
In the first order of business, the Rec Sports Board passed the budget for the 2011 fiscal year.
We also discussed ongoing efforts by NatUP 2010, a student organization dedicated to the renovation and expansion of the Natatorium facility. The group is currently petitioning for signatures to get the Nat construction plans on the ballot in the April 12-14 elections.
For more information, please visit www.natup2010.com
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