Committees explore campus priorities on instructional technology

"Support, funds and places to discuss these issues" are among the challenges to be met

Cutting-edge instructional technologies (IT) can enhance teaching and research, but rapid proliferation of all IT has to offer poses challenges the Brown community must address.

Such challenges were discussed at the Jan. 26 meeting of the Web Advisory Committee, whose members met with Don Wolfe, vice president of Computing and Information Services; geological science Professor John Hermance, chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee on Computers (FACC); and Karen Sibley, associate dean of curricular outreach/summer studies and chair of the Dean of the College's technology committee.

Sibley, for instance, described how her panel's examination of how the Dean of the College's offices could use technology better "moved to more substantive issues...We wanted to find out how technology helps or hinders."

The dean's committee is concerned about the technological divide between students and faculty members, Sibley said. Increasingly, students are more tech-savvy than their professors, she said, yet there still are Brown students who don't know how to get to a course syllabus posted on the Web. Either instance raises the question of what Brown expects of its students and its faculty in terms of technological knowledge.

The FACC has similar concerns, Hermance noted. "The technology needs of the faculty and students are intimately intertwined with those of instruction, scholarly research, the Library, administration and the service sector," he said. He is advocating for a University consensus on the role of technology, as well as an articulated philosophy on the topic.

Hermance shared portions of the FACC's annual report that posed questions about CIS. He praised all that Wolfe and CIS staff have done, but noted that Wolfe needs direction from faculty members about how their IT needs can be better served. "It's the faculty's fault," Hermance said. "We haven't been paying attention over the years" and now demands outpace what budget and staffing allow.

"We need support and funds and places to discuss these issues," he said. To inform the discussions, the FACC is encouraging the following:

• Find out how other universities are managing IT. These models would form a basis for discussing alternatives for Brown.

• Compile a list of who at Brown is working on IT issues already. "As I communicate with my associates around campus I keep finding new pockets of IT interest," Hermance said. "Now it's theater arts and Hispanic studies. Next it will be archeology."

• Pull together into one document the general thoughts and issues identified by the recent President's Technology Review Committee and other reports, then flesh this out with up-to-date information from the Dean of the College's office and the Library.

• Place on the agenda consideration of departments' computing plans. "This coupled with some incentive grants from the dean's office to departments and/or to individual faculty (and/or students) could get the operation in motion at the grass-roots level," Hermance said. "Among other things, how do we identify and fund the 'core' software applications that departments need to assure computer literacy across interdepartmental lines?"