"Lehigh Lab" Facility Underway
Library
and Technology Services Adopted as New Name
LTS People
Readers Guide
Retrospective Searchable from 1890
Telephone System on
Target for May Installation
Lehigh Distance
Education Marks First Decade
The mission of the Lehigh Lab is to champion the adoption of technology innovations by Lehigh faculty. A number of support teams currently provide faculty and students with access to staff and facilities for the enhancement of teaching and learning: Media Production, Media Center, Distance Education, Instructional Technology, and Faculty Development. The Lehigh Lab brings together all of the above areas in both a physical and virtual space. The Technology Resource Learning Center will provide a centralized point of contact for creating new and innovative teaching and learning environments at Lehigh.
The faculty fellow program will be another integral part of the Lehigh Lab. The purpose of the faculty fellow is to research and apply new technologies and to help mentor other faculty at Lehigh. As a year round position, the faculty fellow will provide the leadership and direction for the Lehigh Lab.
Technology Resource Learning Center
The new Technology Resource Learning Center will be located in
Fairchild Martindale Library 370. The renovation will add several new facilities:
a consulting space, a faculty fellow office, a faculty work area, a state-of-the-art
technology classroom, and an upgraded student area.
Consulting Space
The instructional technology consultants will staff the consulting
space throughout the week. The consultants will be responsible for providing
design and technology support for faculty, explaining the new technologies
available, how they work, and how faculty might apply these technologies
in the classroom.
Faculty Work Area
Faculty will have a technology-rich work space in which to use the
hardware and software involved in preparing on-line or technology-enhanced
course material. The faculty work area will consist of three workstations.
Two will be equipped with hardware for scanning slides or papers and one
will be set up to record and edit sound and video. While it is clear that
most faculty members prefer to work in their offices, they do need the
opportunity to try out equipment and learn how to use it before they purchase
equipment. In many cases, they may choose to do hardware-intensive work
at the lab location, and then return to their offices to continue the software
portion of the project. In addition, instructional technology consultants
will make use of the room as a test bed for new software and hardware,
or to test innovative instructional modules with students as part of ongoing
research programs.
Technology Classroom
This multi-purpose room will have two or more flat-screen plasma displays,
a VCR, digital document camera, sound system, instructor station, and media
control system. It will, in as many ways as possible, be configured
to simulate Lehigh’s technology classrooms. The room will also be
equipped for Internet2 (I2) teleconferencing. Furniture will be flexible
to allow arrangement in seminar, small group or individual use styles.
Seating will be for fifteen to twenty, with seminar table seating for a
smaller group.
Faculty Fellow Office
The faculty fellow office will be equipped with a workstation and the
necessary network capacity to connect to I2 at 100 mbs and it will serve
as a location for the faculty fellow to meet with staff and faculty.
Media Center
The Media Center will retain its current functions except that the
Curriculum Materials Collection will be moved to the main floor of Fairchild
Library. The pinwheel carrels will be removed and the TV/VCR units
and audio systems will be located on new or recycled carrels along the
walls. The four current scanning stations will remain and will be
supplemented by additional new stations.
At a time when use of a robust technology is essential in all fields,
the Technology and Research Learning Center will soon be available to team
with faculty to design instructional products that integrate academic content
with state-of-the-art technology practices.
"I have accepted Bruce Taggart's recommendation to change the name of Information Resources to a more self-defining organizational title of Library and Technology Services. I have consulted with the Faculty Steering Committee which has endorsed this change.
Bruce discussed this change with many faculty and staff members, and the Advisory Council for Information Services (ACIS). One of the main issues with the existing Information Resources name is that it does not clearly communicate to both internal and external constituencies what the organization does. The IR acronym also gets confused with International Relations and with Institutional Research because they use IR for an organizational abbreviation."
Jerry Lennon, ESI Senior Analyst, and Willa Ostrosky, Director of Information Systems in Development made a presentation at the SCT Summit 2002 User Conference, in March in Anaheim California. The presentation demonstrated the benefits of enabling Lehigh's development staff to access Banner any time (24/7), from any place via SCT Web for Development Officers.
Technology Management Senior Analyst Steve Lidie has co-authored the book Mastering Perl/Tk, published by O'Reilly in January.
David Morisette, Engineering College Computing Consultant, has passed the Linux Professional Institute Exam 101 that covers fundamental system administration utilities common across all flavors of linux.
Library Technical Services Team Leader Sharon Wiles-Young published "Demystifying MARC Holdings" in Serials Review v.27, no. 3/4 2001 as a report on the CONSER SCCTP workshop on the topic.
Readers' Guide Retrospective is a database containing comprehensive indexing of the most popular general interest periodicals published in the United States and reflects the history of the 20th century. From the wreck of the Titanic to Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon; from the Charleston craze to Woodstock; from Pearl Harbor to the Bay of Pigs, Readers Guide Retrospective offers a record of an entire century of popular magazine coverage, and a reflection of America's evolving attitudes and culture. The current coverage includes the years 1963 through 1982 with over 675,000 entries. When complete in fall 2002 the database will cover the years 1890 through 1982 with more than 2,500,000 entries. In 1982 the "current" Readers Guide database picks up coverage to the present.
Individuals will be most affected during the cutover periods in May (see box below) when incoming calls will be routed directly to voicemail, but already more than 600 new multi-button digital phones have been installed in offices around campus. These phones will work in both the current and the new system. In general, the new phones will be analog phones unless the user needs to have more than one extension on it. All individual faculty and staff phones will have integrated display units allowing the user to see the originating number of the call. Current software features that an individual already has, such as voicemail, call forwarding destination, call pickup group and the like, will be carried forward into the new system and work as they do now. Telephone numbers also will not change.
The Telecommunications Team worked closely with the designated department representatives on the details for each phone in each office. Each department had the option to accept the recommended model of phone for replacement at no cost or to upgrade to a better model and pay the difference. There is no credit or rebate for downgrading an existing phone. New system hardware is also being installed around campus co-located with the old system hardware. This means that the two systems will be able to run in parallel during May as the transition is made from the old Intecom IBX to the new Intecom PointSpan.
To stay current with the progress on the installation, watch for e-mail bulletins before each cutover period or consult the project Web page:: http://www.lehigh.edu/phones/replace.html. For other questions or concerns, contact Telecommunications at x86600 or via e-mail at intel@lehigh.edu.
What's a Cutover?
"Cutover" is when a line and phone are changed
from the old system to the new one. A service interruption should be expected
at cutover, since the line must be rewired to connect to the new system.
Also, most phones are changing from digital to analog, which means a technician
must visit the end location to replace and test the phone equipment. Users
who will retain multi-button digital phones have already received their
new equipment, since it will work on both systems. However, a service interruption
will still occur at cutover as the line is rewired.
Telecommunications deliberately scheduled the three cutovers on weekends near the end of the semester to minimize inconvenience. Administrative users in affected buildings can expect a few hours of downtime on Friday; most students will experience very little downtime since the first cutover affecting a student residence will not occur until Friday of finals week. Nevertheless, service interruptions for individual phones could be 12- 48 hours in duration.
Why such a long service interruption? During each cutover weekend, the service interruptions will commence at noon Friday as the telephone closets are prepared for rewiring. All rewiring should be complete by 3 pm Saturday. The telephone installation crews (who must "follow behind" the rewiring crews in order to properly test the newly installed phone) will begin their work Saturday morning and finish Sunday afternoon. Barring an unexpected problem with a particular phone or its wiring, the longest that a phone will be out of service will be from noon Friday until early afternoon Sunday. As always, please feel free to contact Telecommunications at x86600 with any questions or concerns or e-mail intel@lehigh.edu.
FOR OTHER BUILDINGS, PLEASE CHECK THE WEB: http://www.lehigh.edu/phones/cutsched.html
Spring semester, 2002, marks the tenth year of regular distance education programming at Lehigh. The University's efforts in this area began during the second semester of the 1991-1992 academic year with a handful of students taking two master's degree courses from the Chemistry Department. The courses were delivered by LESN (Lehigh Educational Satellite Network) to corporate employees at their work locations.
(At left see Lehigh’s satellite uplink, installed in 1990 near Iacocca Hall. Today 40% of registrations are for web-based courses.)
This semester satellite students at major corporations throughout the United States are working toward master's degrees, taking individual credit courses, or participating in non-credit workshops in Chemistry, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Polymers Science and Engineering, Quality Engineering, Molecular Biology, and Business Administration.
In 2000, distance education added web-based programming to its satellite courses. A considerable number of individual courses within most of the satellite degree programs, a complete multi-course certificate program _ Supply Chain Management _ and the full master's degree program in Pharmaceutical Chemistry are available on the web.
During the 2001-2002 academic year alone, distance education students will earn over 2,250 academic credits at Lehigh. This level of success has been possible because of the efforts of the many faculty who have developed and taught courses, the University's determination to maintain academic standards wherever students take its courses, and the commitment to technical excellence and student services on the part of the distance education staff.