ITAC minutes
October 4, 2007
Start: 4:04
Attendees: Parkis Bessias, John Board, Bill Cannon, shailesh Chandrasekharan, Tammy Closs, Gene Galin, Ken Hirsh for Dick Danner, Kevin Smith for Nevin Fouts, Tracy Futhey, Michael Goodman, Jackie Gottlieb, Billy Herndon, Rick Hoyle, Edward Gomes for Deborah Jakubs, Bob Newlin for David Jamieson-Drake, Pranay Jinna, Alvin Lebeck, Julian Lombardi, Roger Loyd, Robert Nau, Dan Harden for Caroline Nisbet, Terrance Oas, Lynne O’Brien, Rafael Rodriquez, Molly Tamarkin
Guests: Rob Carter of OIT, Hugh Crumley of OIT, Kevin Davis of OIT, Mark McCahill of OIT, Kevin Miller of OIT, Bob Price of OIT, Kevin Smith, Jeff Chase, Kathy Pfeiffer
Draft Copyright Policy
Presented by Kevin Smith
Kevin reported that the draft copy of the copyright policy will be ready for the Provost in about a week. The only change made so far from the text sent to ITAC is to clearly indicate that the policy applies to audio/visual applications as well as to text. The goal of the policy is to help guide faculty using any copyrighted material to make a good faith effort to stay within copyright boundaries.
The policy should help people make good decisions about copyright issues and help faculty determine “fair use”.
There is nothing very dramatic in what is being proposed.
John Board mentioned that fellow faculty members get “glazed eyes” when it is mentioned that they need to become knowledgeable about copyright issues.
Kevin responded that there are no clear-cut rules about “fair use”. He has found that most faculty members are receptive. He is also available to meet with and help faculty members out.
RT4 asked is there is a way to monitor what is posted on Blackboard.
Kevin said no, Blackboard is closed to all but the instructor, students in the class and a small number of systems administrators.
Tracy mentioned that any copyright violations that were discovered by copyright owners would be brought to the University’s attention.
Henry (Duke attorney) reaffirmed that usually the University would be made aware of possible copyright violations and that Duke would respond. He added that there will ALWAYS be discussions about copyright issues.
Kevin pointed out that the new policy explains allowable usages. If you are going to use a sizable amount of content, you would probably want to alert him as to what is permitted.
Henry noted that copyright owners have exclusive rights, but not a monopoly.
Kevin plans to conduct workshops for faculty and staff about copyright laws and “fair use”.
Julian wanted to know what the liabilities are. Is the University or the individual responsible? He gave the example of making the entire “Gone with the wind” movie available online.
Henry explained that the university would tell the individual that the entire uploaded movie goes beyond fair use. If the individual chooses to post the entire movie despite the university’s stated policy the individual can put themselves in personal liability.
Lynne O’Brian added that individual faculty do not have to get every item of course materials approved by someone; they can apply the fair use principles themselves. The policy is intended to help them do that. However, if faculty need help deciding whether something is fair use, they can contact Kevin.
LT4 noted that the university has to educate the faculty about fair use and copyright use. What happens if an individual does not adhere to these guidelines?
Henry responded that the university can only do so much. Individuals are expected to make an effort to learn about and adhere to policies.
LT7 asked if the compliance department would come out to faculty meetings and train members on copyright fair use.
Kevin answered that he would come out to meet with faculty and train them on fair use. There is also a comic book available about fair use.
Tracy mentioned that there is a fair use video incorporating Disney characters on YouTube.
Tracy wanted to know if this policy was going to Academic Priorities.
Kevin assured her that the policy is going out to all faculty.
Tracy noted that technologies change and that items listed now may not be available in the future.
Kevin said that he was receptive to any suggestions about wording in the policy.
CIT Overview
Presented by Lynne O’Brian
Lynne noted that there are several CIT positions with joint funding and responsibilities to multiple groups.
Academic Technology Consultants deal directly with faculty. These consultants are organized roughly by discipline. However, consultants also deal with things outside their area.
The CIT group is mostly on the left of the organizational chart. The Digital Projects Department primarily deals with digital tools and digital content for the Library.
Yvonne Belanger does evaluation work with faculty, CIT and the medical school.
John Board noted that it is useful to see how this organization has grown and evolved. Does personnel meet the core needs?
Lynne responded that there has been growth in staffing, in part due to the Digital Initiative. Multiple staff members within CIT help with various Duke Digital Initiative activities, regardless of their official job roles. It’s been essential to have this level of staffing.
The CIT’s annual report is on the web site at: http://cit.duke.edu/reports/.
Consulting with faculty has gone up 30% over the past year.
Julian asked what kind of projects CIT was involved in.
Lynne mentioned a number of projects reflecting an interest in GIS and GPS. Faculty also are interested in tools for interactive editing and making side-by-side comparisons or documents or images. CIT provided project support last year for the Faculty IT Fellows Program and for projects utilizing visualization tools and techniques. Projects can be as simple as how to create animations in PowerPoint to tracking Lemurs in the trees with GPS equipment.
Julian said that he was struck by the wonderfully innovative projects CIT was involved in.
Lynne added that many questions start as a simple Blackboard question or basic technology problem. CIT staff may show the instructor how to use a Blackboard feature but also find that the end-user may need something beyond Blackboard. We use each question as a chance to learn more about what instructors are doing, and then try to suggest the best possible strategy for accomplishing what they want to do.
GraduateSchool, Technology & Teaching Developments
Presented by Hugh Crumley
Hugh reported that his predecessor offered a series of one hour, stand-alone four workshops that was worth one credit. In an alternate format, Hugh is teaching the course GS301: Instructional Uses of Technology as a one credit, regular class. There is great demand for this class; it has filled up every semester as soon as offered, and there is a waitlist to get in.
In a new course is being developed for this spring, GS305 College Teaching Practicum, students will be able to apply skills gained in GS 301 and do microteaching demonstrations which will be video recorded.
The initial enrollment in GS 301 in Fall 2006 was two sections of 25. For Spring 2008, there will be one section of GS 301 (25 seats) plus one section of GS 305 (18 seats.)
Hugh does over 50 hours of higher ed instructional technologies workshops. The training most in demand is for electronic teaching portfolios. Demand for this type of training continues to grow each term.
Hugh mentioned that for the departments requesting electronic portfolio training for graduate students, he offers 6 hours of workshops, which run from hand coding html to using Dreamweaver and CSS. He is also working with Nichols to develop a workshop on PowerPoint and the visual display of data. He hopes to add graduate student intern to help deal with this increasing demand.
John Board felt that the courses sound interesting. Are they required by departments? Hugh stated that GS301 is used by the History department for students creating an electronic portfolio in lieu of prelims.
Lynne prompted Hugh about other offerings for students.
LT6 wanted to know if the gradate school offers a course evaluation system of programs.
Hugh responded that he uses a CIT form for evaluation, and that there is not a standard Graduate School evaluation procedure as in Trinity.
LT6 said that people are looking for uniformity between courses. People are looking for feedback from students.
You can find a list of graduate offerings under the help section of cit.duke.edu
Sirish asked about individual student needs.
Hugh also handles these individual cases and does consult with individual graduate students as needed.
Virtualization, Part II
Presented by Jeff Chase
Mark McCahill did part I of the virtualization presentation.
Duke does a lot of research in this area. Duke is looking at “virtual computing” and virtual data centers. What should Duke be doing? What are the options? Is open source a viable solution?
There is a lot of activity in the industry about this in the enterprise space. Researchers are looking at putting a lot of server capability putting it “into a cloud” to be shared as needed.
DSCR – Duke shared Cluster Resource served as a cluster computing service.
This is a useful technology for working server farms. “Green computing” because of energy savings realized by concentrating computing power.
rPath is a local company working on virtualization. Also rBuilder
Clustering at Duke –
Decouple cluster from “cluster computing”
Clusters as a generic “on demand” resource
- hosts a diversity of services
- “let a thousand flowers bloom”
- DSCR is just one service (SGE)
Jeff made an aside on centralization: “centralization” issue often confuses Discussions about clustering and research computing. People are worried about central control over “their” equipment. Collectivization – one size fits all.
Virtualization is a tool for combining the advantages of coordinated resource sharing with local control over software and policy
John Board noted that with virtualization faculty has machines physically at another location but owns the machines.
Julian asked if DSCR could be virtualized.
Jeff’s response - Can we go primetime? Maybe. Certain applications can be run on virtual machines. The is still a lot of research into the future of virtualization.
Duke is involved in the Planet Lab. Jeff's research group has developed a system for leasing and configuring cluster slices on demand.
A user can deploy a SGE batch job service, which obtains resources automatically according to load and policy. We can use a collection of servers and slice and dice according to needs and policy.
John Board asked how far is that system from “prime time”.
Jeff responded that the automated policy is still being worked on. The ability to lease resources from different sites is being examined.
A lot of research is still being done. NC State put a couple of million dollars into their virtualization project.
Julian asked if NCSU stopped doing anything else to put in their virtualization solution.
Jeff was not certain if NCSU had set aside anything to concentrate on virtualization.
Tracy mentioned that NCSU has concentrated their heavy-duty power in one location.
Molly explained that it is difficult to give up server rooms. Is it easy for people to make the leap to going “back” to setting up all the servers in one space?
Jeff elaborated that there are issues with infrastructure resourcing. The old-style of thinking is that “my server is like my toothbrush. No one else is allowed to use it.” This is not current thinking. Jeff thinks we have moved beyond the old thinking now and the faculty are receptive to remote siting of their servers.
Storage is also a big issue. People do not want to give up their “personal” data.
Sirith mentioned that high bandwidth connections between clusters are important. Is this being addressed?
Jeff reconfirmed that bandwidth between data and applications is important.
Kevin Miller added that from a virtual network perspective Duke was working to increase capability as needed between specific points.
Slide and notes are available at https://www.cs.duke.edu/~chase/duke/chase-itac-100407.pdf
SISS Upgrade
Presented by Billy Herndon, Kathy Pfeiffer
Billy kicked off this section by mentioning that Duke used Peoplesoft. He introduced Kathy Pfeiffer and John Campbell who would do a demo of the self-service features.
Tracy mentioned that two Duke grown applications are being incorporated into PeopleSoft software
Kathy explained that SISS went live in 1998. The last upgrade was in 2003. This upgrade would take longer due to the increased functionality that was being added.
Peoplesoft in 1998 was a client based enterprise system.
Duke developed customizations to meet it’s needs.
Duke has been working with PeopleSoft since 2000.
Kathy believed that the latest version 9 is robust enough to go to a full conversion upgrade.
The group has only had the database for three weeks. Fit gap analysis is due in the next 4 to 6 weeks. The execution phase is to start in January and run through July 2008.
Associate director John Campbell brought up a sample of storm to show how it works. Faculty members have to go through a series of clicks to get to the class list.
The new PeopleSoft solution delivers a “faculty center.” Faculty can now easily see all the information they need about their classes.
Tracy asked is the demo was being done with a live database.
John responded that yes, the demo is being run with live Duke data. He showed off a roster with student photos and links that faculty can use to email students. The items currently in storm are delivered without Duke customization.
LT2 remarked that this is more user friendly than Blackboard.
Tracy asked if faculty members can set up and provision their own grade book.
John responded that faculty could do this. However, it was not simple to set up.
John went on to show that faculty members had some “customization” abilities. This included different options and the ability to add future fields as needed. Billy said that he preferred the term “configuration” to “customization”.
Students can see their class list and schedule in their student center.
PeopleSoft’s shopping cart is Duke’s primary book bag.
The student planner shows planned classes out though however long Duke permits.
L4 asked what the relationship was between the student planner and the faculty view.
John said that the faculty advisor can see what a student has and what they need to complete their major.
RT4 wanted to know if students can request an appointment with an advisor through the system.
John responded that this was not possible though the system.
Molly added that there has been a lot of development around advising.
Billy Herndon responded that this ability would be coming in the next phase
John Board asked if load testing is being considered.
Billy answered that load testing would be done.
Adjournment: 5:32