University of Minnesota
Institute of Technology
Minutes of the ITICC Meeting,
September 21, 2006
3:35 p.m., Physics 170
Present: Graham Allan (Phys/Astro), Mark Anderson (Chem), Bryan Carlson (ADCS), Rob Edman (Math), Doug Ernie (ECE), Peter Hudleston (IT Dean’s Office), Michelle Jacobs (CEMS), Phil Kachelmyer (ADCS), Joe Konstan (CSE), Satish Kumar (CEMS), Larry LeMay (ADCS), Jim MacDonald (CSE, IT Labs), Dan MacEwan (Chem), Jeremiah Mans (Phys), Mihai Marasteanu (CE), Sean O’Neill (Astro), Eric Seppanen (EE), Tom Shield (AEM), Larry Storey (CEMS), Dale Swanson (ECE), Juan P. Trelles (ME), Lucas Veverka (ITSB)
1) Introductions
As this was the first meeting of the year, the meeting opened with introductions. Hudleston then described briefly the structure of the committee and its function. He reminded the committee that one faculty member and one student from each department are voting representatives of ITICC, and noted that some departments appointed both an undergraduate and a graduate student member. This is fine, although only one of the two has a vote. Technical support staff are non-voting members of the committee. Hudleston noted that not all members for 2006-07 have yet been identified and said that once this had been done the membership list would be posted.
Concerning the allocation of ITICC funds to departments, Hudleston reminded departments that he had received very few reports of expenditures for 2005-06 or plans for expenditures in 2006-07. No funds will be transferred to the departments until these have been received.
2) Status reports from CSciE and ADCS
Things have got off to a smooth start this semester, except for a problem of corrupted user account profiles. Carlson said that this has affected a few students (he has been made aware of about 30 so far). The problem is typically manifest by an inability to add a printer. Carlson said the problem is permissions-related and occurs at account initiation, but the exact cause is not known. It is easily fixed by resetting the profile.
LeMay said that staffing the labs has been straightforward; he has hired several new consultants. Hudleston asked if students are getting help when needed now all labs have cameras and several are without consultants on a regular basis. LeMay said he thought this was working well. He has put large signs in the labs to tell students what to do in case of problems. Also, the printers are programmed to send an email alert when they are low on paper.
A question was asked about charges for printing. MacDonald said the move to free printing, recommended by the review committee last year, had been made in the summer. For the fall semester, students will get $40 worth of free printing (about xx black-and-white copies). Hudleston asked if any students had exceeded the limit in the summer. LeMay said he thought a few students running large color jobs may have done so. By allowing printing at no extra cost, will we be encouraging students to use more paper? To answer this question, Konstan suggested keeping tabs on the numbers of copies made at the end of the year. MacDonald said it would not be hard to do this.
3) Schedule and Plans for 2006-07
Hudleston distributed a list of major items to be accomplished during the course of the year. He noted that this fall he will be in discussion with individuals in Computer Science and Engineering to work out a plan for moving to a single-entity management for 2007-08. He will report to the committee later on this.
This year is the third year of the three-year cycle for lower division proposals for instructional computing in the major introductory science courses – largely chemistry and physics, with smaller amounts in geology and astronomy. In addition to this, the committee will be reviewing proposals for improvements in the public lab in both the fall and the spring. It will also continue with reviewing proposals under the "new initiative" category, open to all departments. Macdonald thought that the fall round of improvements will be modest this year, given where we are in the cycle of replacement for computers.
There were several questions related to the implementation of the recommendations made in the report of the review committee last year. Konstan raised the issue of the fee paid by non-IT students in IT classes. Students often complain in his classes about paying the IT fee if they are taking just one class and are already paying a fee to their home college. Hudleston said that this is an issue that will be addressed. Konstan also noted that graduate students in IT are unhappy about paying the fee if they do not use the labs. Hudleston said this is not a new complaint. It gets to the core issue of the purpose of the fee, which has both an infrastructure element as well as an individual course-related element. Another issue is whether there should be a fee for non-IT students taking the lower division courses in the sciences and if so how this should be assessed. Hudleston said he has not discussed this yet with his counterparts in other colleges and is somewhat loath to do so, since raising this issue will be opening a Pandora’s box.
Another recommendation made by the review committee that would extend the benefits of the “public” part of ITICC resources to departments whose students make little use of the public labs, is that technical expertise of the management should be made available in some form to departments. This also will be explored.
Since public lab use has been declining, should a greater share of ITICC revenue go the departments? Hudleston said that he thought that the decline in use of IT public labs was probably also mirrored by a decline in use of general purpose departmental labs, and for the same reason – students were able to do more and more of their work on their own computers. He also noted that another option, if current computational needs could be met with a lower revenue stream, would be to reduce the fee.
Yet another recommendation of the review committee was that we should explore the possibility of making Matlab or Mathematica available to all IT students for use on their personal computers. Kachelmyer said that he was looking into this for Matlab. He noted, however, that if this were made available, it would not include a lot of the tool boxes used for special purposes in a number of courses. These would still be only available on the public lab machines.
Hudleston wondered if we could take advantage of the recent move by the state Department of Education to provide ProEngineer at no cost to any high school in Minnesota. It is not clear what version of ProE will be provided to the schools and whether or not this would be equivalent to what is used in IT and needed for our purposes.
4) Other Business
None