Technology@Wooster

At approximately 8:15 p.m. on Tuesday, January 29, the campus lost power due to a falling tree branch. Battery units provide power to our servers under these circumstances, but they can do so only for a short period of time. (Less than two hours.) The purpose of these battery units is to provide the Networks, Telecommunications and Systems (NTS) group the opportunity to shutdown our servers in an orderly way. Should the servers lose power during normal operation they can be damaged and/or data can be lost. NTS arrived on campus shortly after the power failure and were able to shutdown the great majority of servers before the battery units were drained. Power was restored to campus shortly after 11:00 p.m. At that point NTS began to restart services. With the exception of the Datatel system, all critical services were operational by 3:15 a.m. Datatel was available before the beginning of the next business day.

At about 8:30 on the morning of Wednesday, the 30th, NTS staff began working with our support vendor to research anomalies with the storage area network (SAN) that appeared following the power outage. The SAN provides data storage for a significant number of our critical servers. The SAN became unstable while running the routine maintenance and diagnostic routines the vendor recommended. It became necessary to shutdown the SAN shortly after noon. This interrupted those services that rely upon the SAN to house data. These include the Datatel system. The problems with the SAN were corrected at approximately 5:30 p.m. and all services had returned to normal operation two hours later.

We regret the inconveniences that these outages created for the campus community and appreciate your support and understanding. IT is very grateful to NTS members Vince Di Scipio, Roger Dills and John McCreight would worked into the wee hours of Tuesday morning and throughout the following day to restore services.

The media cabinet in Kauke 237 has been equipped with a drawer to permanently house a document camera. IT hopes to make similar modifications to other media cabinets in the building, thereby increasing the number of cameras in permanent locations. This will allow faculty members who rely heavily on document cameras to request rooms permanently equipped with these devices. This action will reduce the number of the mobile cameras that are reservable through the administrative coordinators. Comments about the document cameras in Kauke or the cabinet modification should be directed to David Waldron.

Between June and November, 2006, the Admissions Office implemented College Board’s Recruitment Plus software system.  Since that time, Admissions has relied upon Recruitment Plus to support its student recruitment efforts.  Prospect data is loaded into Recruitment Plus and that data is maintained there throughout the application process.  As other offices on campus—notably Financial Aid, the Registrar’s Office and the Dean of Students Office—also need this information once prospective students apply for admission, the data must come to reside in Colleague. During the initial recruiting cycle on Recruitment Plus, this entailed a great deal of manual data entry and manual synchronization between the two systems. In preparation for the current cycle, IT has been working closely with Admissions, Financial Aid, the Registrar’s Office and the Dean of Students Office to develop an automated interface between the systems. The new interface was used for the first time on Saturday to copy applicant data from Recruitment Plus to Colleague. On Tuesday, the interface was used to perform the first of what will be daily updates between the systems. Interfacing the data between these two systems is a complex undertaking and all the participants have worked hard to make it successful. The group will continue to work to enhance the interface and to better align data structures and procedures within the two systems, as well as relevant procedures within the varous offices that rely most heavily upon this data.

In an effort to better inform members of the campus community about the various information technology resources available to them, the Office of Information Technology has launched an effort to enhance the documentation of these resources and to improve its organization and accessibility.  New documentation is being created in the College wiki and links to it can be found under the “Computing Resources” tab of the IT website. Currently, the wiki contains information about audio and video production resources, copying and printing services, classroom technology, IT help desks and networking services (including wireless).  The documentation initiative will continue throughout the Spring 2008 semester and into the summer, and many new documents will be created. The initiative is being guided by User Services Intern Catherine Grandgeorge.

Colleague and ScotWeb will be unavailable between noon and midnight on Saturday, January 19.  During this period IT will be working to copy data from the legacy administrative software system used by the Development Office to Colleague. This process is a critical part of the implementation of Colleague Advancement—the Datatel module dedicated to the Development and Alumni Affairs Offices.  In addition, IT will be transferring applicant data from the Admissions recruiting system into Colleague.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Questions can be directed to Marlene Brown at x2304.

The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) has scheduled four workshops for associates of member institutions like Wooster.  If interested in attending any of these sessions, please contact Jon Breitenbucher, the College’s NITLE liasion.

• Podcasting for the Liberal Arts Classroom
  Program Date: March 18, 2008
  Nomination Deadline: Friday, February 8, 2008
  Location: Reed College
  For More Information: www.nitle.org/index.php/nitle/content/view/full/2639
   
• Visual Literacy: Using Images for Teaching and Learning
  Program Date: March 19, 2008
  Nomination Deadline: Friday, February 8, 2008
  Location: Reed College
  For More Information: www.nitle.org/index.php/nitle/content/view/full/2638
   
• Teaching Digital Natives: Strategies for Digital Immigrants
  Program Date: May 1, 2008
  Nomination Deadline: Friday, March 21, 2008
  Location: Skidmore College
  For More Information: www.nitle.org/index.php/nitle/content/view/full/2641
   
• Social Software for Education: Collaborative Learning and Research Practices
  Program Date: May 2, 2008 Nomination Deadline: Friday, March 21, 2008.
  Location: Skidmore College
  For More Information: www.nitle.org/index.php/nitle/content/view/full/2640
   

Instructional Technology will host an introductory Moodle session at 4:00 on Thursday, January 17, in Taylor 205. Moodle is the College’s course management system.  This session will be aimed at those new to Moodle and those seeking a refresher. An intermediate session is planned for the week of January 28. Users wishing to explore more advanced features should contact Jon Breitenbucher.

Faculty members can now access all class rosters via Scotweb.  They had been limited to the rosters of those courses that they were teaching.  The new menu option “Class Lists for Chairs” allows the user to specify a department.  Scotweb then displays all the courses offered by that department for the specified term.  The user selects the course of interest and may chose to view the course roster in the standard format or in comma delimited format.  (The information in comma delimited format may be copied and pasted into Excel.)  IT created this new functionality at the request of department chairs.

The College recently signed an agreement with NTI Group to utilitize their Connect-ED emergency notification service.  This service will allow each student, faculty member and staff member to register multiple email addresses and telephone numbers (including cell phone numbers) to receive emergency notifications. College administrators will then use the service to quickly direct emergency messages via email, text message and telephone to those who have registered. In signing the agreement, the College becomes the fifth member of the Ohio Five consortium to engage the Connect-ED service.

Implementation will get underway early in the spring semester. The first step will be to solicit the relevant telephone numbers and email addresses from members of the Wooster community. The implementation will be overseen by the Emergency Response Steering Committee headed by Dean of Students Kurt Holmes. One of the challenges we face in the implementation is organizing our use of the service in ways that accommodate the College’s telephone and email systems effectively.

Last summer, IT implemented a network access control (NAC) system in all student residential spaces.  The NAC is designed to prevent computers that are infected with viruses or worms and computers that are vulnerable to such infections from connecting to the campus network.  This will prevent the spread of infection and help to ensure that the campus network and other IT resources operate effectively.

When students arrived on campus at the beginning of the fall semester and plugged a computer into a network jack, the NAC required that the student authenticate and register the computer. Following registration, a software agent was installed on the student’s computer. This agent scanned the computer for infection and vulnerabilities. If infections or vulnerabilities were detected, the student was directed to the appropriate IT resource for assistance. During that initial semester of the NAC’s operation, infected or vulnerable computers were not prevented from accessing the campus network. This was done to promote a smooth implementation of the NAC. From now on, student computers found to be infected or vulnerable to infection will be prevented from accessing the campus network. Students with infected or vulnerable computers will be directed to the appropriate resource for assistance.

Additional information about the NAC can be found in the following locations. Questions about the NAC should be addressed to the student help desk at xHELP (x4357).

• Network Access Control Set to Debut
• Network Access Control Implementation Set
• Network Services & Wireless Networking