Technology Advisory Group

TAG met for the first time today and had a very productive meeting.  Our main questions for discussion were the following:

• How do we set up lines of communication between the faculty and IR?
• How do we communicate with and solicit feedback from the faculty as a whole?
• How should we communicate within TAG?

And here’s what came up in discussion…

• IT Services has been focusing on pushing announcements through the my.scranton portal (and then as secondary outlets, Bboard, mass emails to faculty).  Most committee members agreed that neither my.scranton portal nor Bboard were used frequently by faculty members.  We discussed the bureaucratic limitations on mass email to faculty.  One possible outlet for faculty communication could be a RoyalList specifically for discussion of tech issues.
• We noted that there’s an age/ability divide among faculty on campus.  Some might still want paper notices, and only about major IT outages, while others want to know every detail and want that information through Facebook/Twitter/other social media.  How do we filter what’s relevant to faculty members and put it into terms they can understand?
• IR often has to make decisions based on meeting the needs of the majority of campus users, sometimes at the cost of convenience to a minority of users (e.g., less support for Macs on campus since fewer people use Macs).  Often unified solutions that work campus-wide may not meet specific individual needs.
• Compromises often have to be made, since resources are limited.  How do we explain these compromises to faculty? We can say “No” when we need to, but it should be phrased as “No, but here’s why not.”
• Faculty often feel like they don’t have input in IR decisions.  Many times there is faculty representation on a product/project committee, but other faculty don’t know about it and feel their voice isn’t being heard.
• Regarding the role of TAG – the group could serve as guinea pigs for testing out new classroom technologies.  We should also be keeping eyes/ears open for other faculty who are already doing this, and make sure we link to their presentations, notes, or syllabi to help other faculty learn from them.

And here’s what we decided on as next steps…

• Set up RoyalLists for TAG-Members and TAG-Discussion, and invite any tech-interested faculty to join TAG-Discussion
• Create a New Technologies tab on the TAG website to start sharing information about which faculty are using new technologies in the classroom
• Invite 1st year faculty to join TAG-Discussion and give TAG feedback on the technology aspects of their transition
• Survey FT and PT faculty on how they’d like to receive IT updates (and why)
• Meet again after the survey results have been received and compiled