March 17, 2004 Minutes

EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY

03/17/2004, 12:30-2:00 pm

ATTENDEES: Kim Chief Elk, Tom Dolen, Jamie Doll, David Gillett, Scott Heffner, Allison Lenkeit, Chuck Lindauer, Dan Mitchell, Willie Pritchard, Eric Rosenthal, John Swensson, Kathleen Turner

GUESTS: Gerry Gyuire, Sharon Luciw, Jim Haynes, Mike Murphy

Convened: 12:34 pm

1. APPROVAL OF THE MINUTES OF THE LAST MEETING

· Need to make a correction to the membership for the Spam Defining subcommittee from FA Senate to FA

2. GENERAL NEWS - WAYNE CHENOWETH WILL COME TO THE NEXT MEETING TO UPDATE ETAC ON PROGRESS WITH SECTION 508

· Wayne Chenoweth will come to the next meeting

He will give an update on the progress of getting closer to a 508-compliance statement

Wayne works with another committee, mostly made up of individuals who deal with those who need assistive technology

· Last week the District was awarded a $600k grant from the Hewlett Foundation, to work on developing an open source course management system for community colleges in conjunction with the Sakai Initiative (a national effort by mostly research universities to develop a course management system that will be open source. Stanford, MIT, Michigan & Indiana have already developed modules)

We got the grant to customize the Sakai CMS so that it will deal with issues that are specific to a community college instruction as opposed to a research university or four-year institution
ETUDES course management system, which uses Microsoft's .NET, was going to take longer to develop than the Sakai product It will be called ETUDES.NG (next generation) and will have the same functionality that we want with ETUDES

There will be some changes in how faculty interact with it
There will be a reasonable amount of time to migrate things over from ETUDES to ETUDES NG
Part of the plan is to build in a migration tool for any one who is using the current version of ETUDES
Eventually there will be porting tools for Web CT and Blackboard, etc.

Vivian has already done a fairly extensive needs analysis

She has about 65 characteristics of what faculty want to have and has prioritized them

This was done as part of the ETUDES development process

John Swensson wants to make certain that De Anza (the senates & the community) is kept in the loop about ETUDES, especially since Foothill is so much further ahead than De Anza

3. SUBCOMMITTEE REPORTS - NONE

· Hardware & Software Committee meets the first week of the month

Will meet April 6^th

· Defining Spam Subcommittee still needs more representatives

Need as much faculty involvement as possible

The filter has a much more direct impact on faculty, in terms of the diversity of content they are involved with and their contact with students through e-mail

ETAC members need to go back to their constituency groups to recruit more representatives

Let Pam know as soon as possible of any new members for the committee

4. SECURITY AWARENESS DEMONSTRATION/DISCUSSION (GOOGLE SEARCH CAPABILITIES)

· With the web and personal computers, anybody can have any data if they have the authorization to log into certain accounts in the district

Anybody can collect data on a computer, about students or whatever, if they have the right type of software
What is happening is that information that needs to be kept secure is not being handled in a proper, secure manner and this brings about a certain amount of vulnerability in our security

· Willie gave a demonstration on how an individual could can use "Google" to get different types of information

"Google" has very sophisticated search capabilities -

You can ask it to search a particular site by typing in "site: " followed by the Domain or web address
It will look at the content of PDF documents, as well as Excel and Word documents

· In order to use alternative ID numbers for identification, all the customized programs that were developed over the last 18 years, have to be looked at to make certain that they are captured and a new alternative ID is applied

There is no exact target date at this point for the alternative ID conversion
The first piece that will come up will be employees
The student ID conversion will follow the employee conversion
The current 9 digit SS# will be replaced by an 8 digit number
The system will be able to accept either the SS# or the new 8 digit number

· ETAC will need to constantly make certain that their constituency groups are aware that things can be easily found on our website and that we need to take great care in how we are handling confidential things (i.e.: SS#'s, salaries, etc)
· There is a concern about students who transmit data over the network in our open labs and their ability to follow what's going on

There is a tool "Key Logger" that tracks all the traffic on a computer

It is able to pick up passwords, accounts, etc
The tool had been installed on computers in the open computer labs on the FH campus and we had to warn people not to do any online shopping; we now have a mechanism for detecting when the key logger software is installed so that we can remove it immediately
Parents buy this product in order to monitor what their children are doing on the computer

· Need to be careful how you put things on the network, especially confidential stuff

There are ways to encrypt, but we have not yet authorized or set up a standard for encrypting e-mail, nor have we gone to recommending that we do it district wide
Currently there is no timeline available for providing a standard for encrypting district wide e-mail

· There are a number of tools that you can install on any laptop with a wireless card, called "Stumbler Software", that allows you to identify wireless signals and how strong they are

The software comes with built in tools that allow you to hack into the network
One of the reasons we need to make certain that we have "Blue Socket" installed is to prevent individuals from hacking into our network. We need to make certain that our network is secure and that we are able to identify anyone who joins our wireless network

5. DEMONSTRATION OF PORTAL ENVIRONMENT AND DISCUSSION ON POLICY ABOUT BUILDING LINKS WITHIN THE PORTAL THAT GO TO SITES WITH ADVERTISING

· Willie logged onto a "sandbox account" to give a demonstration of what kinds of functionality the new FHDA portal can have
· ETS has the hardware for the portal, and already has it installed on our site
· We had the software and yesterday got the documentation on how to install it
· CampusEAI, an open source portal, non-profit company, is providing the support and the software

They have given us sandbox accounts on their servers so we can learn what it does and mock up our own site
Anything we do can be ported over to our own portal once it has been installed

· There are a growing number of portlets that can be used and can be installed in our portal environment

We are a part of a consortium that consists of about 30 universities together with CampusEAI, to build portlets for this environment

· A portal environment is customizable and personalizable

Can define by type of individual (student, staff, faculty, etc) what their portal environment contains
Once inside the portal, a person can decide, within a certain range, what type of portlets to use from a collection of available portlets
Will be able to go to a repository of portlets, browse through them and select one
Still need programmers to develop the portlets themselves
Willie is currently working with a steering committee to determine what portlets we want to have available and are in the process of prioritizing them
Working with the marketing and communications departments to determine what information to have available for student; they will also design the user interface

· The Maui replacement is one of the top priorities

A data query portlet needs to be developed inside the portal that will replace MAUI
Currently in the process of defining exactly how much work it is and what functionality is wanted
Will need to get the programmers trained and up to speed on how to develop a portlet and then we will get started on it

Have a user group that was created back before we got the portal grant, when ETS was doing a bid development process for a data query tool

Since then, the user group has shifted its focus and direction to do it through the portal

· We currently have a board policy that talks about no commercial use when using web technology

When clicking on many of the portlets you get advertising and in many cases it comes from perfectly legitimate sites we want students, faculty, and employees to see
ETAC was asked how they felt about direct links to sites that may have advertising on them, if they had a problem with it and was it necessary to have a formal policy on the issue

Dan Mitchell brought up the fact that when a student is asked to read a magazine or newspaper article, there are ads in them
There are ads on the web
All that is necessary is that a disclaimer is put in stating that links here go elsewhere and we can't control the content
Jamie inquired if the links that contained advertising could be a different color, so the user would have a choice if they wanted to go there or not

Willie said that ETS would have to see if the portlets were customizable to that level and maybe it could be done by building an icon into the display of the portlet to indicate that there may be advertising associated with that link
Could possibly put a disclaimer statement on the login screen

There was a consensus to come up with a way to tell users, consistently, that there may be advertisements we don't endorse and that it is being supplied by someone else, and the least obtrusive way is probably the most desirable

· ETS is open to ideas on portlets that might be appropriate to develop for our environment

6. STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS - (1) REVIEW DRAFT VISION STATEMENT, (2) BREAK UP INTO GROUPS AND FOCUS ON OUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES

· There was a very brief discussion on how to revise the three possible vision statements

Committee members wanted the word "whereby" in the first and second statements changed to "where"
There was the suggestion to replace "and the global community" with "within the global community"
May want to include something about secure networks - which will be a challenge for the next four years
There was a suggestion to incorporate the phrase "extraordinary learning opportunities", found in the first and third vision statements, into the second statement
There was a suggestion to shorten the first statement
Willie will revise statements based upon the committees input
Will try to settle upon a vision statement by the next ETAC meeting on April 7th

7. OTHER ITEMS FROM THE COMMITTEE

· Welcomed Jamie Doll back
· Introduction of Jim Haynes to the committee

Jim will replace Scott Heffner as FA rep during the spring quarter

· Kathleen Turner raised the question about wireless and Blue Socket

Blue Socket is not the access point and is not a replacement for the Apple Airport
Blue Socket is a box in the network closet to secure the wireless local area network
Once there is an LDAP directory set up and Blue Socket is installed, ETS will be able to extend the security to identifying and authenticating those signing onto the web

· Dan Mitchell joined the ETAC meeting via iSight

iSight currently has a one-to-one videoconference capability

· Due to all the anticipated difficulties with parking on the De Anza campus, Willie suggested that the ETAC meetings for next quarter be conducted via video conference

The District has new video conferencing equipment that has been supplied to us by the state
There was a consensus to do an interactive video conference for the first week of the spring quarter

Adjourned: 2:02 pm

Next Meeting: Wednesday, April 7, 12:30 - 2:00 pm, Video Conference

Last Updated: Tuesday, April 6, 2004 at 11:06:39 AM
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