TACT was retired as an offical college committee by action of College Council in the spring of 2005. These pages are no longer updated but are preserved as valuable reference material.

About TACT
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PRESENT: Barbara McIntire, Cindy Dietz, Linda Loft, Steve Pruch, Kaaren O'Rourke, Linda Grenz

Facilitator: Stephen Pruch

Recorder: Linda Grenz

1.  Steven handed out a current technology fund activity spreadsheet. Approximately 2/3 of the departments that received TACT funding have spent their 04/05 allocations. Departments who have not yet spent their allocations have indicated that they will be doing so before the end of the year. Stephen will update the activity spreadsheet monthly. He will also look for patterns in spending from the past years to help predict future trends.

2. The committee reviewed three TACT fund requests. Stephen will contact the managers making the requests and ask for more information before determining whether these requests should be included in the Unit Plan process or if they should be considered for contingency funding.

3. The committee discussed annual allocations of TACT funds. Annual allocations would go to those departments who have recurring technology costs that TACT has approved in the past. These departments would be required to submit a TACT request showing their last year allocation for the expense(s) and the proposed expense(s) for the coming year explaining any discrepancies between the two. TACT would then be able to make approvals of the annual allocations prior to reviewing Unit Plans. The departments that the committee has identified that could possibly apply for annual allocations are: Instructional Computing, Information Technology, Distance Learning, and the Library (for subscription databases). The Library will submit a request for subscription databases to test this procedure (when?).

4.  The committee discussed whether or not TACT should implement a “smart classroom” project. Some ideas and comments included:

• Possibly three classrooms a year would be equipped as smart classrooms. These are rooms that a particular department does not feel a sense of ownership of and may not consider smart classroom upgrades when writing their department's Unit Plan.
• What is a smart classroom? An instructor's station, a projector, a screen, a computer…
• Should TACT's priority be to equip the heavily used classrooms first?
• Who is using the classroom? Should an instructor survey be done before a classroom is upgraded even if it is a heavily used room?

Stephen will take the committee's comments and prepare a document.

5.   Publication Reports:

• Linda Grenz shared an article, “Technology Trends for Intranet Librarians” with the group. Although the article is geared towards library staff, there are many applications that can be used campus wide including: Wi-Fi, XHTML, Weblogs, news feeds via RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary), and more.
• Stephen will be attending a conference on security.
• The Opera browser is now available free for colleges and universities (EduCause).

Next Meeting:   January 27, 2005 from 3pm to 5pm in ADM206.