Annual Report, 1998-99

 To the Academic Senate, Santa Cruz Division:

Charles McDowell served as chair of the Senate Committee on Computing and Telecommunications (CCT) for 1998-99. Victor Burgin (History of Consciousness), Ben Crow (Sociology), Joel Ferguson (Computer Engineering), Eli Hollander (Theater Arts), Darrell Long (Computer Science), Geoffrey Pullum (Linguistics), and Elizabeth Stephens (Art) served on the committee. Patrick Lecuyer ex officio (CATS), Eric Jacobson (student representative), and Makis Tzamaloukas (GSA representative) also served on the committee.

CCT met four times during the past academic year. This committee is purely advisory, and as such, we discussed a number of computing and telecommunications related issues, with the hope of making recommendations to the Chancellor and the Senate. Below are the major issues discussed, and the recommendation of the committee.

This question was not addressed in the first two meetings, in anticipation that Executive Vice Chancellor Simpson would take some action based upon the CATS Assessment Report (CAR) written by an ad-hoc committee during the summer of 1998. Quite late in the year, CCT learned from EVC Simpson that he was uncomfortable with the recommendation of the CAR with regard to its suggestion for an alternative administrative advising structure to ITPC (as are a number of other members of the campus community).

The CAR opined that a Chief Information Officer, with budget responsibility for all IT services at UCSC was not an appropriate model for UCSC. The report stated that "a more decentralized model would be more effective." We believe that the correct solution may lie somewhere between a traditional CIO and the multitude of committees recommended in the CAR.

CCT recommends that a single person (an Assistant VC?) take responsibility for coordinating the activities of the existing communication and information technology activities at UCSC. This person would draw on the resources of the Office of Planning and Budget, and the existing committees, both formal and informal. Those committees include but are not limited to the Council of Deans, the divisional computer coordinators, the Teaching and Learning Technology Roundtable (recently established by Associate Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education, Lynda Goff), the Committee on Planning and Budbet, the Committee on Teaching, and CCT.

This AVC should definitely not also be the head of CATS. The CATS budget is roughly one-third of the total computing budget for the campus. It appears to us that it is a direct conflict of interest to have the head of CATS be the primary advisor to the EVC with regard to computing issues.

In a word, yes. More and more students come to UCSC, already familiar with using e-mail and the Web. For those needing instruction in these skills, there is an on-line, self-paced tutorial, developed at UCSC. The tutorial is called NetTrail. It is designed to take about 3 hours and provides instruction on basic Web browsing, e-mail, electronic discussion groups and electronic access to the library. The URL for NetTrail is http://nettrail.ucsc.edu/nettrail/master/.

We want to thank the Committee on Research for the support of faculty workstations in their Faculty Research Support Initiative Proposal. EVC Simpson funded this proposal. Central funds have been allocated to provide $325 per year per FTE for staff, faculty and TAs. Each unit must provide dollar for dollar matching funds. We encourage individual faculty to speak with their department chairs, and department chairs to speak with their deans to make sure that these funds are utilized and that all faculty have an up-to-date workstation.

Although we have not had time to study this question carefully, it appears that there is growing support for clearly isolating ICL from other CATS services. In fact, the budget for ICL is already funded completely from 19906 funds (a special flavor of state funds) and is the only sub-unit in CATS that receives these funds. For some specialized instructional computing labs, it may be beneficial to move those labs under direct control of the various divisions. At the same time, we feel that basic computer access for word processing, e-mail and Web browsing should be available in each college. This is clearly a centralized service and should be managed by a central organization.

On a related issue, we have been informed that the reserves that have been used for upgrading ICL computers runs out in 2000-2001. If control of some labs is going to be moved to the divisions, additional funding must accompany that move. We do not want to recommend that the ICL budget shortfall be solved by moving the responsibility for the labs to the divisions with no additional funds.

CCT has been informed that CATS will soon make available to all faculty, staff, and students, remote access via an independent ISP. This will provide unlimited remote access, with a contractually guaranteed, very high availability. It will also provide local call access in all areas served by the ISP, which includes the San Francisco, East Bay and Monterey Bay areas. We were unable to come to agreement about the extent to which the University should subsidize this type of access.

One suggestion is that the Faculty Focus newsletter, put out by the Center for Teaching Excellence, include a section on new developments in technology related to teaching. CATS provides a number of technology seminars each year, but a forum with a broader audience is needed. CATS also provides Web pages about various technology options for faculty, however, this requires you to know what you are looking for.

There are still many faculty that rely on Macs. Some ICL labs should continue to be equipped with Macs.

Yes, for base level Web access, e-mail and word processing. These could be recycled computers from other primary ICL labs.

October 12, 1999