The Technology and Learning Subcommittee is an expanded subcommittee of the Committee on Library and Computer Support Services and was established in January of 1995 at the request of President Marshall. Our charge is to: "...explore options and make recommendations for bold new technology initiatives that would dramatically and practically, given our resource base, improve our educational program and put us on the cutting edge of small liberal arts colleges using technology to enhance learning."
We met a total of 12 times and also engaged in extensive electronic discussions. We also met with representatives of Apple Computer Corporation on Saturday, April 8, took a trip to the Moakley Center For Technological Applications at Bridgewater State College on April 28, and a trip to Wellesley College on May 17. Members also attended conferences individually, including the Nercomp conference on Residential Computing at Wellesley on March 3 (Frances Shirley), the "Executive Briefing on Distance Learning" at the NYNEX Learning Center on June 9 (Tim Barker), a workshop on Computer-Aided Language Learning at the National Foreign Language Research Center at the University of Hawaii on July 21-26 (Kirk Anderson), and the conference on "Electronic Teaching and Learning in Higher Education" at the Moakley Center at Bridgewater State College on September 8 (Peter Deekle). We submitted a preliminary report to President's Council and COCAT on April 5, outlining our thoughts to date and requesting funding for faculty workshops. Members of the committee and librarians organized a one-day workshop in May attended by approximately 30 faculty and a second one-day workshop in June attended by approximately 15 faculty interested in doing summer projects; a number of such projects were completed last summer. We are grateful to the faculty for completing a survey on current uses of technology and to Bill Conley (Dean of Undergraduate Admission at Case Western Reserve University) and Dr. Rick Detweiler (President of Hartwick College) for extensive phone conversations with Tim Barker about their experience with student ownership of microcomputers.
We encourage all readers of this final report to send us comments and suggestions; electronic messages to "techgrp" will reach all committee members simultaneously and are therefore particularly useful.
Kirk Anderson
Tim Barker, Chair
Tom Brooks
Dave Caldwell
Peter Deekle
Kathleen Ebert-Zawasky
Fred Kollett
Mark LeBlanc
David McClintock '95
Bob Muttart
Sherry O'Brien
Julie Quinn
Carrie Sherman '96
Frances Shirley
Gordy Weil
Our current strengths and rapid recent advances in computer technology create the opportunity for a bold, distinctive program.
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." -Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." -The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
"But what . . . is it good for?" -Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1969, commenting on the microchip
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -Ken Olson, President, Chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp, 1977
(Source: business section of the Kansas City Star, Jan. 17, 1995)
We realize that predicting the future of technology is fraught with uncertainty, even for the best informed experts, but we are convinced that the role of computers in education will become increasingly important, and at an accelerating rate. It became clear to us early in our study of technology and learning that computers are now the underpinning of almost every technology. Video and sound, for example, which were totally separate technologies as recently as a few years ago, can now be conveyed and studied with great effectiveness using computers. Within the next few years, we expect the following additional changes will have occurred: All mathematics and science study will be accompanied by computer-based demonstrations, simulations, and computational tools. Language instruction will include computer-based drills and testing; grammar checkers and sentence parsers will help more advanced students to improve their writing. Texts in the social sciences will be on CD-ROM with direct access to very recent data on such subjects as world demographics, world economics, and world politics. A growing number of great literary collections will be available on CD-ROM (as the works of Shakespeare are today). All the great works of art will be available in digitized form, as will all the great music, many of the great films, and ever more vast collections of data. Many national editions of daily newspapers will almost certainly be available electronically, as will periodicals of all types. College courses will be available over the Internet, and the Internet will have assumed an even greater role in helping us to access information.
We were encouraged to learn that, compared to many institutions, Wheaton is very well-positioned to benefit from these changes. The introduction of Banner has given campus-wide access to important information, and, thanks to a small group of staff and faculty, we have an excellent Campus Wide Information Server. The decision made a number of years ago to standardize on a single kind of computer gives us a significant advantage over institutions which are trying to support two. "Key-served" software has been available over the network for several years, allowing economical widespread access to a variety of productivity and discipline-specific software; many other institutions are not doing this. We learned from our survey that many of our faculty are using a wide variety of computer applications in both their teaching and their research. Nearly all faculty have up-to-date computers (many with CD-ROM drives) in their offices, are comfortable with word processing and email, and routinely access the library Online Public Access Catalog. Many have begun to use the World Wide Web, and some have created their own home pages, taking advantage of the dedication, creativity, and hard work of a few staff from the Library and the Communications Office, as well as other faculty and students. Wheaton's small size is also a great advantage in allowing us to adjust rapidly to change (a fact noted by FIPSE representatives when they decided to support the Balanced Curriculum Project). Most importantly, the extension of the campus network to all student dorms by next fall gives us a huge opportunity to involve students more fully in this enterprise.
The program that we propose is not intended to create "MIT on the Rumford River"; rather, it is designed to build on our strengths and help us become better at everything we do. We envision a campus community in which students learn more efficiently and independently and are more active participants in their education, both inside the classroom and outside it; in which students communicate more clearly and effectively among themselves and to the outside world; in which students are given more opportunity to produce their own creative work of value to the Wheaton community and beyond. We believe that the program we describe here will make these phrases become practical reality. We believe that it is bold and innovative and has the potential to distinguish us from every other small liberal arts college in the country. We believe that full implementation of this program will be every bit as transformative as the Balanced Curriculum Project and the Work and Learning Initiative, both of which offer models for achieving the goals described here. But it will not be easy to make this program succeed--it will a require significant financial investment by a college under great economic stress and a time investment by people who are already overburdened. We should not begin unless we as a community are aware of these realities and are nevertheless willing to accept the challenge.
The heart of our proposal focuses on the role of computer technology in the educational experience of our students and consists of three progressive steps: an introduction to learning in a networked community, communicating and computing across the curriculum, and creative contributions to a networked community.
Students will develop computer skills throughout their careers at Wheaton and beyond, but the most intense part of this phase should be at the beginning of their careers so that they can begin immediately to use computers as productively as possible.
Recommendations: We propose that freshman orientation, including expanded orientation, should be modified to include basic computer skills training. The current First Year Seminar Library component in the syllabus for each section should be transformed into an information technology component, still completed with the assistance of library staff.
A detailed schedule of the proposed computer skills training section of orientation is given in Appendix 1. Students will learn how to use email (something that was done successfully during this year's Orientation), Banner, and Drop Boxes, do an exercise with the Internet (including using the Wheaton library OPAC), be introduced to word processing, spreadsheet, and data base software, develop a "product" for their First Year Seminar (possibly getting information from the World Wide Web and integrating it into a document using presentation software), and possibly take placement and assessment exams by computer. They will clearly not become experts in all these areas, but we expect them to be fully competent in many and at least familiar enough with others so that they can start to take advantage of all the resources on a networked campus. The skills they learn should be ones that can be used quickly and creatively and which will be of immediate value to them as they adjust to life as members of the Wheaton community.
The First Year Seminar Library component already introduces students to using OPAC and other computer-related reference skills. We believe that this component also gives us an opportunity to give our students a more sophisticated introduction to the powers and limitations of the Internet.
Possible Example: During the computer skills training section in orientation, students could both learn how to use a database and put this skill to immediate and productive use. They will first enter biographical and other information about themselves in a database on the campus-wide network. They will also learn how to shoot a brief video introducing themselves, and how to "capture" it using a computer for (optional) inclusion in the database. They will then be taught how to search the database to find other students who have the same home town (and so might want to share rides home, for example) and to search for others with similar extra-curricular interests. They will also learn how to sort the database by residence hall (so that they can learn to recognize and "know" upper class students in their residence hall even before they arrive back on campus), and course (so that they, like faculty, can learn who is in their courses even before the first classes meets). Harvard Business School is one of the few institutions that does something similar to this, but our students will have an edge over theirs in that ours will be learning the skills necessary to create the database themselves.
It is important that the skills described above be exercised as soon as possible, or they will be lost. Even more importantly, we believe that faculty teaching introductory courses will discover that they can teach more effectively now that they can count on all students having a solid computer skills background.
Recommendation: We propose that virtually all introductory courses provide opportunities for students to apply the skills they have been introduced to in the First Component; where possible, to expose students to representative applications in the discipline and encourage students to develop skills in those applications.
We expect that, as a result, students should recognize the role of computer technology as a material part of their learning experience and should be able to take fuller advantage, both inside and outside the classroom, of their membership an electronically-enhanced learning community.
Examples: Students already use computers for word processing in their freshman writing courses. All calculus courses use a powerful computational program called Maple, and computers are an important tool in most introductory science courses. Other introductory courses such as statistics and language instruction are also starting to use computerized materials. Since our students will now understand the basics of spreadsheets and data bases, it may be that we will want to revise teaching methods in some social science courses. Faculty are beginning to investigate the value of electronic discussions in their courses, especially in First Year Seminars. Frances Shirley and Myrna Pearson (working with Sherry O'Brien) have developed a home page for their First Year Seminars, complete with "hot button" links to outside sources of related information. (We can envision in the near future opening these to everyone on the Internet; prospective students could learn about seminars they might take at Wheaton, possibly joining in the electronic discussions themselves.) John Collins uses the Physics home page to make written problem solutions available to students, saving the time and money required to distribute paper copies. The Art History slide collection is now digitized, allowing students to view slides shown in class on a few machines on campus (access will soon be expanded to all networked computers); we understand that Dartmouth has convincing evidence that this kind of access significantly improves student performance in their art history courses. At Wellesley, Mary Coyne, Professor of Biological Sciences, has all her lecture graphics available over the network; a student of hers told us that the class atmosphere changed as a result, with students much more relaxed and engaged, knowing that they could look at the material later without having to copy it down in class. This technique could be applied to many courses at Wheaton, and, for uncopyrighted material, to library course reserves as well.
It is clear that computers already are playing an important role in a wide variety of introductory courses. We expect this to expand and are excited by the potential that the network holds for further transforming the education of our students. As one example, the network can give our students easy access to tutorials. We envision tutorials being developed by both faculty and students for specific courses as well as for basic skills needed in a variety of courses (such as the Hypercard math tutorials being developed by Shelly Leibowitz). It is already possible to incorporate QuickTime video segments into such tutorials, and this technology is improving rapidly. Such tutorials hold the potential to help our weaker students to pull themselves up to the level of the rest of the class, greatly facilitating class dynamics. In summary, computers hold great potential for helping our students to become more independent and active participants in their education, starting in their very first year at Wheaton.
The College should offer students a broad range of curricular and extra-curricular opportunities to continue to develop their computer skills creatively, and, as they become more proficient, independently. Such opportunities should be an integral part of courses in every area of the curriculum, and should be made widely available outside the classroom as well. (In some ways, this component is parallel to the Writing Intensive requirement, in which students develop an understanding of a subject by writing about it.)
The Committee discussed many possible ways of achieving this goal, including recommending the addition of a "Computer Intensive" requirement. In the end, we preferred to use the Balanced Curriculum and Work and Learning Initiatives as models; instead of imposing an additional requirement on students, we strongly urge departments to incorporate computing into upper-level courses as a natural part of their curriculum.
Recommendations: We propose that all major programs should seek to add significant discipline-specific computer applications and content to at least one 200- or 300-level course. In such a course, students should expect to use the computer as a creative tool, reflecting the state of the art in their respective field. In addition, every department should be prepared to provide interested and qualified students with opportunities to pursue advanced or independent study using computer technology in the field. We should continue to encourage students to explore related opportunities outside the classroom.
Examples from the Classroom: John Grady is becoming proficient at using computers to edit video, and his students are starting to use computers in their video work. For her senior thesis, Michelle Ripa '96, will use a computer to help her produce a video on welfare reform and teenage pregnancy. Tom Cushman, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wellesley, has his students study TV coverage of topics such as the Vietnam War and then use a computer to digitize short relevant clips from the coverage so that they can be included in the electronic papers they submit to him. He tells us that his students work harder, enjoy their work more, and produce more thoughtful papers. We are especially excited by the power computers give students to not only learn new material but to make creative contributions to the rest of the community. Morgan Holland, while a student in Tim Barker's Astronomy 202 course, conceived of the idea of creating a Hypercard stack to illustrate a concept known as the HR diagram; the stack is now an important teaching tool in most introductory-level astronomy courses. Students in Mark LeBlanc's Structured Programming course are doing HTML projects in which they produce home pages for campus departments; the students learn how their theoretical work can be applied to real-world problem-solving, while the departments benefit from the students' expertise. We foresee many more such opportunities for students to work collaboratively and creatively with faculty.
Examples from Outside the Classroom: Tom Cornyn '98 has used his computer skills to help a number of offices on campus, including, most recently, the Admission Office and the Filene Center. Phil Dangler '96, is developing an on-line version of the Wheaton Quarterly with hot button links to World Wide Web sites that are relevant to the articles in the magazine. Phil, like Mark LeBlanc's students, will be able to list the electronic address of his work in any resume. Projects of this kind clearly warrant a notation on a student's "second transcript."
In summary, there are really two different but related kinds of advanced uses of computers-one that teaches students to work with state-of-the-discipline programs and products in a classroom setting, and one that allows students to go even further and create material of campus-wide-and even world-wide-value.
We recommend significant investments in faculty training, while recognizing that the ultimate success of this program depends heavily on the faculty's commitment to it.
This program will not succeed unless it is strongly supported by the entire faculty. As described earlier in this report, many faculty have made great progress in integrating computers into the curriculum. The Committee is concerned, however, about the huge range in skills among the faculty. Although we need not all have mastered the details of the latest tools (such as Hypercard or HTML), we all need to understand how these tools can be used to help the education of our students. The faculty members of the Committee in particular believe that being familiar with how communications and other computer technologies can enhance the study of any discipline is a matter of professional responsibility, and that every department should be prepared to support majors wishing to pursue a technology-intensive project.
Recommendations: We propose that two-day workshops should be offered in May or June of 1996 and 1997; all faculty should be strongly encouraged to attend either or both. There should be continued support for technology-related course transformations.
The workshops will be similar in format to the highly-successful one given last May, but will focus on teaching faculty the same computer skills that incoming freshmen will be taught, using essentially the same "lesson plans." This will give us a critically-important opportunity to evaluate the freshman skills instruction program in advance, bring faculty "up to speed," and also get faculty data in the network database so that students can have access to it. (Instead of doing video introductions of themselves, faculty might want to do brief video introductions to the courses that they teach.) In addition, faculty will learn from colleagues about how they draw on student computer skills when they teach their introductory courses.
The course transformation projects will also be similar to those undertaken by faculty in the past. We welcome projects that deal with any of the three components of the program, but we anticipate that an increasing percentage will focus on the third component.
During the Apollo program, NASA gave its astronauts the same kind of camera they would be using on the moon and encouraged them to become familiar with the camera by using it as much as possible in everyday life. Although Wheaton cannot afford the luxury of giving all faculty and staff computers for home use, it does provide interest-free loans for computer purchases. In addition, faculty and staff should be aware of the Apple Citibank Visa program, in which using the Visa card can accumulate as much as $1500 over a three-year period toward the purchase of Apple products. Application forms are available from Tim Barker or Fred Kollett.
The cost of owning a computer should be bundled into the price of coming to Wheaton.
It became clear to us early in our discussions that students will have to have much more immediate access to computers than they currently do if the program is to succeed. Before deciding to recommend that computers be built into the price of coming to Wheaton, we discussed and rejected several options, including providing a computer for every room, renting from an outside agency, and requiring each student to buy a computer.
Providing a computer for every room (or in clusters in residence halls) would be a relatively inexpensive solution, but it would not provide the immediate access our students will need, would significantly complicate student access to electronic communications such as email, and might lead to problems of maintenance and even vandalism. Renting from an outside agency, as some institutions do, makes no sense to us because the cost (whether absorbed by us or passed on to students) is significantly higher than direct purchase.
Many institutions are solving the problem of student access by requiring their students to buy their own computers; we believe that it would be both irresponsible and a strategic mistake for the college to follow this trend. It would be irresponsible because it would be in effect imposing a significant tuition increase, irrespective of the financial needs of individual students, while avoiding our responsibility to state the increase explicitly. It would be a strategic mistake because it would be a strong disincentive for many prospective students otherwise interested in attending Wheaton. In addition, we are concerned about the problems that other institutions have had when students try to cut costs by bringing non-standard machines to campus, creating a nightmare for support services when they tried to put them on the network; no business would permit such a situation, and neither should we. The following article from the "Cyberscope" section in the September 25 issue of Newsweek describes some of these issues well:
"Rising tuition costs and increasingly large loans aren't the only financial issues facing college students; the latest threat to their parents' pocketbooks comes from mandatory computers. Wake Forest University will require entering freshmen from 1996 on to purchase a college-specified laptop computer at a cost of $3,000 a year. In California, Sonoma State University has mandated that students have 'uninterrupted 24-hour access' to a PC but is not dictating which model. Students have protested at both institutions, fearing that financial aid won't keep pace with computer costs, and lower the economic diversity of the student body. But the colleges are forging ahead with their plans; in today's increasingly high-tech world, students would have better luck asking for a 'no exams' policy."
We believe that the recommendation below is by far the best way to provide students with immediate access to computers.
Recommendation: We propose that, starting in the fall of 1997, all incoming students should be provided with a computer.
This program will be very similar to the Computer Agreement currently signed by Balfour Scholars: A student will be able to use the computer during the time he/she is enrolled at Wheaton, including break periods and summers. If the student leaves Wheaton prior to graduation, the computer remains the property of Wheaton. Upon the student's graduation from Wheaton, the computer will belong to the student. Wheaton will be responsible for the usual and ordinary maintenance of the computer while the student is enrolled.
Advantages of student ownership: Ownership ensures that all students have a computer (which is essential for any integrated program like that we are proposing) and that all in a given class year have the same machine (which is essential for Wheaton, given our limited support resources). It is the least expensive way to provide every student with a computer. Even if we passed the cost of ownership directly on to students, it would cost them less than if they bought one themselves because they would not have to pay a sales tax, we can purchase the computer at a volume discount otherwise unavailable to them, and because it would count as part of the cost of their education for the purposes of calculating their federal financial aid.
We expect that having a computer on every desk will lead to a change in the way students view residence hall life. At Drew University, for example, computers became one of the few things that every student had in common, and the social environment did change as a result. We envision that campus communications will become more efficient and powerful. As one example, the Wire might no longer be published on paper. Although this would unfortunately mean that it could not be read under a tree, it could be "published" much more frequently and inexpensively, could facilitate much more rapid and widespread campus involvement, and could include color photos and video interviews and video coverage of campus events. This is yet one more example of how computers have the potential to expand students' sense of community.
We know of no other institution with a program like the one we are proposing.
Some of its distinctive elements are:
We know of only a handful of other institutions where computer ownership is built into the cost of tuition: Drew University (the first to institute such a program), Hartwick, Drexel, and Bennington. The latter two are clearly very different kinds of institutions from Wheaton. Drew and Hartwick have established very successful programs, but we understand that they are fundamentally different from what we are proposing Wheaton do. They use PC laptop computers, do not currently exploit the campus network as fully as we propose, do not support faculty development to the degree we do, and do not have the kind of integrated educational program we are proposing, with its links to the Work and Learning Initiative. In the words of one member of the Committee, "We should go for it."
We believe that this program holds significant potential for improving both admissions and retention. When Drew instituted its computer ownership program in 1984, there was a 40-45% increase in applications, despite an increase in tuition of 15-18%. (Both Dr. Rick Detweiler, who was on the faculty committee at Drew that recommended the program, and Dr. Bill Conley, who became Director of Admissions at Drew that year, caution, however, that they have no proof that computer ownership alone was responsible for this increase, nor can we conclude that the impact for Wheaton would be as great as this. We hope that the survey of Balfour Scholars that is currently being undertaken will help us to better estimate the possible impact at Wheaton.) When a similar program was instituted at Hartwick shortly after Dr. Detweiler became president there a few years ago, he estimates that the program brought about a 10-15% increase in applications. He also believes that retention is helped by the fact that students would have to give up their computers if they left. The Committee is in agreement with both Dr. Detweiler and Dr. Conley that computer ownership in itself is no panacea for admission or retention problems. We know of at least two institutions, in fact, where the ownership program failed disastrously, due to lack of faculty support. Computer ownership is only a small (but essential) part of the program we are recommending here; if we institute an ownership program, it should be clearly explained in this way.
We recommend that the first round of faculty workshops be given in the spring of 1996. In the fall of 1996, all student housing will be fully networked, and we will have our first opportunity to educate our students in such an environment. The second round of faculty workshops in the spring of 1997 should prepare us for the fall of 1997, when the entire entering class will receive computers. (Appropriately, this is the class of 2001.)
We discussed making this timetable even more aggressive, but decided against doing so, in view of our need to first gain more experience with the network and to have a year to fully publicize the program to prospective students. But we note that, as far back as March of 1988, the Committee for Computer Policy and Planning issued a report cogently stating the need for the rapid development of both a student computer ownership program and a campus-wide network. In some ways, we have benefited from the long delay: the costs now are much lower, and the technology much more powerful. At the same time, however, the college has missed out on the significant educational and competitive advantages that such a program would have given us, and the Committee believes that the timetable given above is the slowest one that should be considered.
Our charge asked us to investigate how distance learning could be used most effectively at Wheaton. We were initially uniformly skeptical about the role of distance learning at an institution that values its residential community. Gradually, however, most members became excited by the potential that computer technology holds for reaching students we do not currently-especially continuing education students and alumnae/i. Our view changed in part because people experienced in distance learning, have told us that "content is everything." Although offering a course electronically requires new pedagogical techniques, we need not reinvent what we teach or invest in glitzy technological aids. The other key to the success of a distance learning program is the dedication of the instructor-primarily his or her willingness to give timely feedback on submitted work and to give individual attention to students. Both of these attributes are, of course, very much a part of Wheaton's current culture. Large institutions have been doing distance learning for decades, but there may well be a market for courses offered by small liberal arts colleges and designed for continuing education students who are looking for a different kind of distance learning experience-one that is more intimate and responsive to them as individuals. If we were to offer such a program, it could be of considerable value to some of our traditional students as well (those needing to take a summer course, for example, or students on LOA or JYA). An outline of one possible approach to offering such courses is given in the second appendix.
After some discussion, the Committee decided to recommend against embarking on such a program in the immediate future, however. Our resources will already be strained to develop the on-campus program that we have outlined in the first part of this report. In addition, most of the expertise that we will gain by developing the on-campus program would be of value to us if we should ultimately do distance learning; it makes more sense for us to concentrate now on the college's central mission and consider distance learning when our greater experience with the appropriate technologies and improvements in the technologies themselves make it a more straightforward proposition. We do, however, recommend immediately implementing a more limited distance learning project.
Recommendation: We propose that, as quickly as possible, the college should develop a distance learning program for alumnae/i in the form of an electronic version of the current Road Scholars program (a "Superhighway" Scholars program?).
This program would be in the form of non-credit mini-courses offered at minimal cost ($100?, including all course materials). The main goal of such a program would be, like that of the Road Scholars program, to support the capital campaign. But it would have the advantages of giving participants more extensive academic experiences (which Road Scholars program participants tell us they would very much appreciate), while costing the college nothing. (We recommend that funds remaining after paying program expenses go to the faculty teaching the course.) Such a program would also give us valuable experience in distance learning and let us "test the waters" for interest in a more extensive program. We believe that almost any subject could be taught in such a program; the following hypothetical examples are chosen from each of the three divisions to illustrate somewhat different ways in which such courses could be given.
Example 1: "Ecology of North America," taught by John Kricher (based on Biology 215). Participants would receive videotapes of several illustrated lectures, an autographed copy of one of John's books, and an invitation to engage in an electronic dialog with him.
Example 2: "Film/Culture of the 70's and 80's," taught by Dick Pearce (based on English 242) After paying a deposit, participants would receive videotapes of the relevant films, videotapes of Dick discussing them, and an invitation to engage in an electronic dialog with him.
Example 3: "Gender Inequality," taught by Kersti Yllo (based on Sociology 260) Participants would receive videotapes of several discussion classes, an autographed copy of Kersti's book, and an invitation to engage in an electronic discussion with her and the students in the course.
(We could not resist making an editorial suggestion: the first "class" in each course should begin with a hand-held video taken by a "student" who walks across the Dimple into the classroom and is greeted by the instructor.)
After our report has been submitted and discussed, our subcommittee will no longer formally exist, although all the members are willing to do all they can as individuals to help the program succeed. The formal task of overseeing the implementation of the recommendations in this proposal will be done by our parent committee, the Committee on Library and Computer Support Services. Among the new functions that we foresee this committee performing are:
We believe that all of these functions fall within the charge to this committee as spelled out in faculty legislation. We believe that the membership needs to be expanded, however. The current membership consists of three (currently untenured) faculty, two students, and, depending on the topics under discussion, the College Librarian, the Director of Academic Computing, and the Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. In view of its expanded role, the Committee needs more staff and administrative expertise. Since it will be dealing with controversial issues (including the evaluation of faculty proposals), a tenured faculty member should also be added.
Recommendations: We propose that the membership of the Committee on Library and Computer Support Services should be expanded to include the following as non-voting members: Associate Provost, Assistant Director of Academic Computing, Director of Information Technology and Services, Librarian for Information Technology, and Director of Audiovisual Services. We recommend that a tenured voting faculty member, elected from the faculty at large, also be added to the Committee.
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