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The following information was emailed to the IT SIG and submitted to the ACE Board on July 22nd, 2000.

'''Information Technology SIG June 2000 Report'''

Officers

     Chairman: Linda Ffolliott, University of Arizona, ffolinda@ag.arizona.edu
     Vice-Chair: Ron Thomas, University of Florida, rkt@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu 
     Vice-Chair Elect: David Rice, North Dakota State University, drice@ndsuext.nodak.edu 
     In-coming vice-chair elect: Jim Hollyer, University of Hawaii, hollyer@hawaii.edu 

'''Goals (or action items) and levels of success'''

Although I did not write my fall report in terms of goals, nor did I use the word in the report, I would say our primary goal was to increase communication with members. I think there was more communication than in recent years, but the level of communication from most members fell considerably lower than expected.

'''Specific things focused on this year were:'''

1. Continuation of the web site

Dave Rice assumed responsibility for the vast bulk of the site, and did a good job of rapidly posting new items to the site, adding in information about previous award winners and upcoming events. He has done an excellent job. There are on our site three input forms: one for a short member profile, one for listserv recommendations, and one for websites of interest. I contacted via email at least 90% of the members in our SIG who were not already profiled, asking for input to the profiles file, and received back responses from perhaps 8 people. Although we do need to continue to have a web site, my current recommendation is to drop these three input sheets and their "resulting" web documents, since we are not getting regular inputs from members. I do not think dated information is better than no information, at least in terms of these three sections of the web site. But the new slate of officers can make a final decision on this.

'''2. Reinstatement of our electronic newsletter'''

The officers concurred last summer that we should try to restart our electronic newsletter, because making our primary focus the annual meeting hurt the members who were not able to come. Unlike some of the other SIG newsletters, I wanted our newsletter to be short project or resource sharing tips from members. In general this was the most time consuming thing I did for the SIG this past year, taking perhaps 15-30 hours per issue. Most of the time was spent in trying to talk people into writing things. Although we were able to pull together enough items for five issues, it was extremely time consuming. I am not certain that the incoming officers will want to to continue the newsletter, given the time it takes. I know there are lots of things going on, but it is very difficult to get people to write something for the most part.

'''3. Use of our $300'''

As an experiment this year, the officers decided to take the $300 SIG money and use it as a first and second place prize for people contributing the most items to the newsletter. I do not think this was a successful venture. I do not think it was an incentive for most people to write more newsletter items. However, we will award the funds as we indicated. The award winners are Donna Seaver, first prize; and a tie for second prize between Jim Coats and Jim Hollyer.

'''4. The IT SIG awards'''

Ron Thomas assumed leadership of reviewing the awards with input from members. He received no comments about needing to change the awards and so we proposed no changes. We used the same judge that has been used recently

     Dr. Roger Crouse, Director,
     Information Technology Services, Trinity College of Vermont
     208 Colchester Avenue, Burlington VT 05401
     rcourse@charity.trinity.edu
     phone: 802-658-0337, ext. 275

There were similar submissions as in previous years, in terms of number of items. My recommendation is that the technology education award be dropped, and perhaps the interactive media program award should be incorporated in with the DEID SIG.


{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:left" border="1"
|+This table shows the trends over the last four years:
|-
! !! 1997 !! 1998 !! 1999 !! 2000
|-
! Interactive media program
| 4 || 2 || 6 || 3
|-
! Best innovative use of technology
| 7 || 6 || 2 || 6
|-
! Technology education
| 4 || 0 || 1 || 0
|-
! Web site
| (new) || (new) || 18 || 16
|}



We received one nomination for the Award of Excellence, but our committee felt this was an excellent candidate and recommended he receive the award. Roger Terry will be receiving this award in 2000.

5. Plans for the USACC

I have only been involved in planning for programming for the past three years (for the Asilomar meeting, for the meeting in Knoxsville, and for the current year), but my general impression is that SIG input and recommendations on programming were not particularly important for this year's meeting. I began late summer/fall gung ho, with the assumption that our input was important, but as the details came out later in the year, it seemed that SIG leadership had no more input than any other member. During the course of the fall I put at least 40 hours into this whole process, and one program idea after another fell through. Because we were told that speakers had to come from the D.C. area, to minimize costs, and we did not get a lot of help identifying local speakers, coming up with good program ideas became a frustrating activity. As the fall progressed, my attitude was affected by feedback I got from IT members that many planned on going to the NETC meeting in Texas and skipping the DC meeting. I am grateful that Ron Thomas, our incoming chair, had his program idea accepted.

Should a joint DC meeting occur again in four years, I would strongly suggest that the pretense of having "SIG" sessions be dropped and/or that officers be given more specific guidelines on program priorities. We had been told that suggestions would come from the other associations, in terms of the types of things they would be interested in, and that did not materialize. I felt we were trying to aim at an unknown target in suggesting program topics that would appeal to "all groups." Also I found it frustrating as a leader that preliminary programming information was not shared with the SIG leadership nor were we asked to rank (in our opinion) the relative value of suggested presentations from our SIG's perspective. SIGs can provide input on the programming without having the final say. The lack of communication with the SIG leaders this year (on the programming) contributed to my feeling that our involvement was not valued.

I feel that how much the SIG is to participate in the planning of the programs for the summer meeting needs to be more clearly communicated in upcoming years. In part because any incoming leader is going to have limited time to volunteer to ACE activities, it really would be helpful to know if major time should go into programming or if it should be spend in other SIG activities.

6. Election of vice-chair elect

We had two excellent people willing to run for vice chair-elect: Jim Hollyer and Neal Vines. This was the first time in quite a while that we actually had an election. Jim Hollyer was elected.

7. An electronic workshop

We proposed in the fall report doing an electronic class on web site accessibility. This is a cooperative project involving NETC and ACE members, as well as other trainers. The class will be a six week class, starting August 4, with material posted weekly. I announced this class on June 18, and we have some 45 registrations already (June 29). We will have to assess the success of this workshop to determine if others should be considered in the future. I personally feel our organization need to hold more electronic and asynchronous professional development activities. What percentage of the ACE membership actually attends annual meetings? Even if it is 50%, that still leaves a considerable group without much professional benefit.

Barriers

I think the major barrier which has hindered success this year has been general member apathy and/or busyness. This has been encountered by previous leaders, I am sure. After a certain point, it gets very discouraging.

Recommendations

This was a recommendation I made in the fall and I still think it is worth repeating. I think one thing that would be useful for general ACE members is to have a web-based database of members indicating their primary responsibilities and also coding to some keywords that SIG leaders could suggest. This should be searchable, so I could look for people doing video compression, using Dreamweaver for web sites, or doing Internet training, etc. This should be put on the ACE web site. Although the ACE members list on the web site can be used to find specific people (especially if you know something about them already), it really does not help me connect with parallel people in other states if I do not know what they do.

Most ACE members are working in situations with budget cutbacks, loss of positions, and more things on their work plate. So any officer has a limit on the time that can be given to the organization. It would help to have some priorities expressed by the Board in terms of expectations of SIG officers. Is it more important to work on C&A? Internal communication? Special workshops? Programming for summer meetings?

Submitted by Linda Ffolliott, IT SIG chair, June 29, 2000

[[Category:ACE IT SIG]]
[[Category:Annual Report]]