Nov. 15, 2012, FTC meeting; started at 5:05 p.m.

1. Grantscape – Ginger Saarliaho (and Kathy Kuy)

www.bc.edu/grantscape

Ginger and Kathy first presented to the FTC in 2011-2012. Ginger returns with an operational website – the RFP database discussed one year ago has become “Grantscape”; some FTC members have piloted and tested the resulting website.

Product presentation:

Eligibility (for the time being)

BC faculty and post-docs only – insufficient resources for grad students

BC community with BC credentials – four posters

Screened to be BC specific; classified by areas of interest; areas of interest wide - err on the side of “wide net”

Functionality:

First level – recent ops; recent proposals;

Opportunities can be selected and grouped in folders as with any database.

Customization for each faculty member – search page organized for “finding funding opportunities” by individual.

Non-BC collaboration: Opps can be emailed, but external researchers do not have separate access to Grantscape.

Subscription service: Two types of subscribing – 1 - RFP Bulletin replaced by Grantscape “Bulletin” will include all opportunities. 2 - Secondary customized “funding alert” can be subscribed to by interest area.

When submitted, proposals will begin with a “Pre-proposal Form” which includes departmental ranking of proposals. Proposals with limits on numbers eligible from BC are decided ultimately by Larry McLaughlin, Vice Provost for Research, Office of the Provost and Dean of Faculties (in cases of multiple proposals).

The Grantscape team eager and available for departments, groups, and individuals. Contact areas listed on the website by schools (e.g. Kathy Kuy for A&S, Law Woods, etc.)

Data has been building over 8 years; based on consultation of all available databases (e.g. Duke University grant resource). ALL listings are private grants; not .gov. This is designed as a reliable resource for a controlled private set of funders; federal grant funding much more complex. Possible expansion to this area down the road.

Graduate student question revisited (Lynn Johnson, History, question). Grad students can be, of course, involved in collaborations with faculty, but faculty alone eligible to use the resource actively at this time.

Some foundations do not have formal RFPs and Grantscape is looking to discover other forms of funding. These opportunities are an active area of Grantscape interest.

Grantscape will be featured in BC Chronicle.

IDeS luncheon, Dec. 6 at noon (Ginger, Kathy and Rita) in Corcoran Commons will feature Grantscape. All FTCs will be subscribed to the bulletin.

Opportunities for which BC has won awards are listed, but only as “Recent BC Grants” listed under the funder (e.g. under “Sloan Foundation”).

2. Ideas about Faculty-Student engagement via technology (Rita Owens):

Rita brought a proposal from Provost: Provost Garza’s call (recent Faculty Forum) for suggestions about enhancing student/faculty interaction via social media; “how to enhance student/faculty interaction”. Rita going to UCT, Board of Chairs, etc – Rita wants to know what is going on in different institutions – what do we know from our disciplines? Rita anticipates using these good ideas to get them to “bubble up”. Hottest trends and topics in this area. (October minutes)

Rita. What is going on in disciplines regarding engagement using technology? – BC in an investigative stage. Technology that works which can engage students now.

Faculty ideas:

Sharlene Hesse-Biber, Sociology – In answer to the “home work” questions: what do you use? What would you like? What training might you need? Answer to A: current technology often does not work. YouTube clips often mess up everything. Can these basic things be accessed from the Cloud? People are now using Skype for conferences with students. Answer to B. Stats. Packages desired. C. More training with technology.

Clare O’Connor, Biology. “Tricky Concepts” in use in her Biology courses.

Need? Skills and software for group projects. Practicums. “How to do” groups.

Kevin Kidd, Library. Personal librarian program. 112 students per librarian. Feed students useful information on a periodic basis. Librarian available to each student as their own contact. This is an expansion of the basic library services by making a direct connection.

Need. Possibilities for “Rating” people who are speaking; tracking peer evaluations in public speaking, presentation and writing contexts.

Need. What do you want to know about your students the day the class begins? Can we use Qualtrics surveys for this? Mike Graff, Physics – iClicker can be used to discover who doesn’t have one or another basic skill or understanding at the start of a course.

Rita mentioned Erich Mazur BC lecture form the last Technology Day in this context. “Learning Catalytics” is software to pair and match students by level of understanding. Joe Burdo, Biology, spoke to using devices and in Word Cloud to generate “expanding” keywords in answers that the software collects. Cost for students is $12 per student.

Crystal Tiala – technology used for knowledge creation in Fine Arts. No need for tools creating quantified data. Qualitative tools for evaluating artistic work would be valuable?

Affinity groups? Large groups of faculty. Pooling information based on a process of “digital curation”. Rita suggests Mediacron or Wiki software could be used for this type of activity.

Michael Connolly – Advising. Profiles of advisees would be useful. Created by the Advising Center? Or student-generated and maintained?

Lynn Johnson, History, reports flipped classroom not that suitable for History courses; tool for determining student grasp of material in advance of class useful; from a batch of student questions that would reveal keywords of problematic concepts. Where they had trouble.

Studio Art observation. Critiquing – “grid up” student work in O’Neill 246(?)? All student work up at the same time.

3. Scott Cann. Quotas in the email system. January implementation of a plan for quotas – size limits on mail boxed; “soft enforcement”. 70% utilization metric. As soon as one reaches 70% notice will be served. New email accounts wil have a 2 GB capacity.

Image files and bitmap files can be enormous (GB scale). Fine arts exceptions can be established.

Barry S. - Space is finite and we need to clean up once in a while. “Quota” principle will be to used to create the opportunity to ask people to clean up files to keep cost down. Archives that are part of the mailbox are counted in this quota, but emails can be archived externally. “Best practices” in archiving will be made clear – clean up is pretty simple. Simple ways can knock out huge bundles of emails. Documentation is needed; documentation should be available to faculty. Generally recognized that archiving is not an easy or intuitive process. Scott Cann does not yet know where the documentation will be.

Joe Burdo – Spam filter is being much more aggressive. Outlook client issue of filtering – trouble report has been submitted.

To all FTCs: Warn colleagues that the quota issue is coming their way.

4. EduRoam. Now at Law School, and O’Neill. See October minutes for details.

5. Clare O’Connor is now editor of the faculty technology newsletter, replacing Rich Jenson. Send her technology news items.

6. Technology money by departments has been pulled back this year. It seems we must now go to Joyce Mannix in the Deans Office. The change was unannounced. The money is there as budgeted, but requests bounce. Joe Carroll approached – the idea was to make sure the money did get spent. So, spend the money. Make sure we use the money. Alert colleagues to spend the money. And not on toner and other supplies. Did I say use it or lose it?

Meeting ended 6:30 p.m. Next meeting, Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Respectfully submitted by Tim Duket