Welcome Back to School!

I always get excited about a new school year getting my new box of crayons and shiny new yellow pencils that signal a fresh beginning in the Fall. Today, of course, the "crayons" is a software package for your PC that lets you draw on a computer monitor and the pencils are our word processors (how many of you remember the very early one entitled "Electric Pencil?") Whatever form our learning technologies take, their renewed adoption at this time of year quickens the blood of those in academia who love teaching and learning.

New, Improved Computer Services

We in Academic Computing Services will be providing new and improved computer services to the UNT community in the coming academic year. Let me describe some of the most significant expansions of service that we have in the works.

• Our central research minicomputer ("Sol") has doubled in capacity to eight 250 MHz UltraSparc processors, 2 GB of memory, and about 90 GB of disk storage. The researchers on campus who rely on that computer should notice greatly reduced processing times on their jobs as a result of this upgrade, which completes a $500,000 upgrade that was started last Fall.
• The Interactive Learning Team (ILT), headed by Jenny Jopling, has an additional full-time development person on board, so they are able to better meet the needs for instructional development assistance than in the past. In cooperation with the new Coordinator of Distance Education, the University Libraries, and ACS's own Central Web Support group, the Interactive Learning Team will be part of a coordinated effort to provide consulting, training, and development assistance for distributed learning on campus. A major focus of that new "Distributed Learning Team" will be distance education.
• We've also gained one-and-a-half new positions in our Central Web Support group. They're working on campus-wide Web projects including an up-to-date Web calendar of campus events, additional training on Web authoring, expanded support for departmental authoring, and forming an informal interest group of Web developers on campus. Because of the very rapid rate of change in Web software and services, it's hard to predict what other Web projects Mark Wilcox's group will tackle, but let them know if you need specific products or services that aren't available now.
  

  We'll be very active participants in what promises to be a major tool for computer support personnel across campus a new call tracking system. Chris Strauss, the Help Desk manager, is the lead technical support person for that product, the Remedy Action Request System. Expected to become operational early in 1998, the ARS will let support personnel share their expertise more easily than is now possible, better track requests for assistance, and eventually let end-users find out the status of their problem reports.

• Our Statistical Consulting Services department continues to improve its expert advice on the use of statistical analyses in research. While we certainly have to share the credit with UNT's Political Science department, we're proud that Karl Ho, who heads that service, received the Samuel Beer Award from the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in British Politics in 1997. Karl's award reflects the deep level of expertise that he and his two assistants are able to share with researchers here.
• A recent tripling in disk capacity on our newsgroup server will allow us to increase the time we're able to hold postings for most of the groups we get from our news "feeds." Also, we'll continue to expand our very popular listserv service which, since its inception early this year, already supports 65 lists. Bahram Paiaini can help you get a list established for your class, organization, department, etc.
• In the article, "Computing Center Restructures Internet Services for Students", Dr. Philip Baczewski describes the changes in our newly-titled Internet Services. We have high hopes that the modifications we're making to our internal procedures and to the focus of those procedures will result in a better level of service for persons who use ACS' computers to receive their E-mail and host their Web pages.

The service improvements that I've listed above are only the most noticeable ones that we've initiated recently. Academic Computing Services will continue to strive to meet the needs of students and faculty for instructional and research computing in the forthcoming year. Please let me know if you have any suggestions about how we can help meet your needs.

1. Joey Hoffman, who had been a part-time member of the ILT, took this full-time position.

2. Sharon Marek, who has been a part-time employee in the Central Web Support area for some time now, was hired full-time in September. We're hoping to have the second position filled soon.

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