WWW Steering Committee
Minutes of the Meeting
28 February 1996

Present: S. Hirby, M. Bjornerud, S. Butts, P. Gilbert, R. Lowe

1. Email address directory update

Hirby reported on his discussions with Anne Norman. At present there is no automated way to track student preferences regarding withholding directory information. Having this ability would be a good thing, but it's not high on Anne's list of necessary improvements.

Anne recommends the creation of a fourth category of directory information that would include just email addresses. This would give people more flexibility in what information is revealed about them.

We discussed Hirby's draft memo to the President's Staff. We applauded his efforts to not split infinitives.

Lowe opined that, if we're going to do an email directory, it might be best to go all the way and do a full online directory. After much back and forth, Hirby volunteered to add a paragraph to his memo mentioning the possibility of adding other category 1 directory info to the online directory.

2. Possible Colloquium on Internet Issues

Hirby reported on his conversation with Candice Bradley regarding a possible Science Hall/Main Hall Colloquium (or Colloquia) on issues of instructional uses of technology. Possible topics include: show and tell from people using the web in teaching, network security, bandwidth, language, gender, freedom-of- speech issues on the Internet. We agreed that *some* kind of promotion would be a good thing.

After a discussion of what the committee's role should be in all of this, Bjornerud volunteered to follow up with Candice about actually setting up a colloquium. Gilbert was assigned to contact possible speaker Jim O'Donnell, a UPenn classicist who has done extensive teaching with the Net. Gilbert will also contact Dean Harrison about using Faculty Meeting time to demonstrate instructional uses of the Net.

3. Summer projects

Hirby reported on his conversation with Susan Dean about IDEA funds for web projects. I'm not sure where we ended up with this, except that Robert and Pete were going to see if they could find a student for deLerma.

4. Departmental home pages

The memo announcing the ability to create departmental home pages went out to department chairs. There has not been a stampede of requests. We wondered whether we should promote the project more widely.

Lowe will put some/more documentation online and then we'll follow-up with a promotional email message to the whole faculty.

Haphazardly submitted,

Pete Gilbert


revised: 11-Mar-1996
peter.j.gilbert@lawrence.edu