Priorities

The following priorities were abstracted from the subgroup reports and rank ordered by the full PWG. This ranking reflects our sense of the relative urgency of the items for the goals and reputation of Georgetown. Although the first two priorities might seem to lie outside a narrow reading of the charge to our group, there was an overwhelming consensus for their inclusion and for their prominent rankings, because the value of the remaining priorities will be greatly diminished until these are attended to, and because of the serious issues of equity that they address. Of course we cannot and should not wait until the campus is completely wired before undertaking or even completing far less expensive items of lower priority. But we must also recognize clearly that these two items are no longer luxuries that can be put off indefinitely until we find the money or until we renovate a particular dormitory. Almost every issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education brings news that another college of lower reputation and smaller financial resources than Georgetown's has wired its campus and equipped its faculty with computers. Accomplishing this for Georgetown may require some re-evaluation of priorities at the highest levels of administration, but our emphatic recommendation is that this must be done.

1. All faculty members should have reasonably current personal computers or terminals with LAN access to shared multi-user workstations, where the latter option is appropriate and cost effective. The university must budget for routine hardware and software upgrades and replacement.

2. All faculty, students, and staff should have effective LAN connections to the campus High Speed Network. Wiring the campus (offices and dorms) should proceed with urgency, and with continuing attention to evolving wireless technologies. To provide network access to faculty, students, and staff from off campus, and to offices and dorms in the short run, the university should either engage a major commercial Internet provider or arrange for university maintained SLIP/PPP accounts and expanded modem access.

3. Eliminate the fragmented responsibility and authority for management of the information environment. Ensure faculty input by establishing a single, campus-wide oversight group, with substantial faculty representation, with responsibility and authority for implementation of these recommendations.

4. Provide adequate facilities for the use of computers in the classroom. This means an expanded mixture of specially equipped classrooms, including rooms with stationary networked computers (with individual network access in some), rooms with network connections and projection facilities for instructors, and classrooms with facilities for students to use their own laptops in the classroom.

5. Continue to support and expand resources for Internet and WWW development, including personnel for the development of projects, and technical programming support. The university should strive to synchronize WWW and Internet development on campus.

6. Provide adequate printing facilities on campus for faculty and students.

7. Make a selection of core software resources available for use across the entire university, and periodically re-examine the client-server models in use, to determine where it is best for applications to be located.

8. Improve incentives, training, and support for faculty who use technology in instruction.

9. Train support staff in the applications of electronic communications technology to management of routine university functions such as grading, scheduling, catalog information etc.

10. Improve security on all LANs so that we can discourage hackers and put more sensitive applications on the net, including mail-enabled homework, course evaluations, etc.

11. Evaluate the requirements of high-end applications such as real-time data support, full-motion video, desktop teleconferencing, and virtual reality, and ensure that the LAN will have enough bandwidth for all of these applications, when they become available.

12. Create a center or centers of innovation and development for multimedia, simulation, database, text computing, and other integrative technologies.

13. Move rapidly to a fully electronic, paperless registration system.

14. Develop an electronic credentialing system for degrees that is easily accessible to students and advisers.

15. Exploit Email and electronic bulletin boards to ameliorate the proliferation of junk paper mail and junk voice mail.

16. Take electronic publishing into account in promotion and tenure decisions.

17. Wherever possible, digital databases of all types (online, on CD, etc.) should be acquired by the library and made available to the whole community via the network; this is likely to require some adjustment in funding for the libraries to reflect the acquisition of these new materials.

18. Provide seed money for grants that include purchases of databases or access to databases.

19. Implement central management of site licenses for widely used software, together with university-wide procedures for tracking software use and for determining when a software package has become widely enough used or desired to make a site license cost effective.

20. Investigate creating or purchasing a software system for electronic grading that would be available to (but not required of) all faculty, to avoid faculty members repeatedly reinventing the wheel.