Contents
Key Accomplishments
Professional Development & Service
Stats & Facts
Research Support
New/Retired Services
Assessment
IT Focus Areas 2017-2018
About CIT
CIT’s Vision is to be an innovative information technology department that aspires to provide reliable creative solutions, to be a transformative influence, and to empower our campus community.
CIT's Mission is to provide outstanding leadership and technology support in pursuit of the mission and goals of the college.
Goals
Outstanding Service: Be a trusted source for outstanding service and sound guidance.
Knowledge and Experience: Develop knowledge and experience through a commitment to professional development and training.
Partnership: Collaborate to advance teaching, learning, innovation and discovery.
Reliability: Provide secure and reliable infrastructure.
Stimulate imagination: Find innovative solutions through the use of new or existing technologies.
It's Not About IT
by Sue Chichester, CIO
For the past several months, I have been focusing on reading about how to create and communicate the value of IT. While the folks in CIT spend a lot of time implementing new and upgrading existing technology, the real value of what we do is in the stories from our Geneseo community. So, this year I would like to share with you a few short stories.
You may have heard about Glenn McClure’s trip to Antartica. He spent about a month there with a team of climate scientists gathering information to compose music based upon seismic data gathered at the site. Glenn received a National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Fellowship for the project. Glenn came back with some BIG data. He returned with over 170 million data points! He was looking for a way to automate the process of taking the raw numerical data from the science experiments and converting them to musical notes.
Printing Improvements
Saying that printers can be frustrating may be the understatement of the century. Some people would a prefer a visit to the dentist, spend the day waiting in line at a busy DMV, or pull an acre of weeds to fighting with a malfunctioning printer. Over the years, students have fought with issues of accidental duplication, sorting through a pile of prints that came before them, the hunt for printers in giant space where everything has the same room number, and having to abandon their printouts when they ran out of time before the start of class. Perhaps this is why the printer rage and subsequent destruction scenes in the movie Office Space remain so popular. On the other side, IT people have to deal with stolen paper, fixing print jams, piles of abandoned printouts, and a variety of other malfunctions and messages.
That situation could not stand so CIT set out to fix it.
Beth Adams, Lecturer, Languages & Literatures is teaching an Intermediate Spanish course online this summer using Canvas. Beth incorporated the use of video and audio in discussion forums and in oral quizzes. Instead of just providing text in discussions, Beth's students videoed their discussion posts.
Doug MacKenzie, Associate Professor in the School of Education, teaches courses in American Sign Language. Doug's introductory ASL I students are introduced to approximately 600 individual signs. These signs are taught during class time with guided practice to help the students incorporate these signs into conversations using ASL syntax, which is quite different from English. Doug found that students would often take handwritten notes on how to produce each sign and then rely on one of several online sign dictionaries to help them review outside of class. For many ASL signs there are variations, just like in English, where there is more than one word associated with an object (e.g. car, vehicle, automobile). This can be confusing to students because some sign dictionaries will show the more common version while others will show a version that is seldom used today. Doug has always wanted to create his own video dictionary that would closely align with what he covers in class, be easy to access, and easier to search. Doug shared, "Years ago, when I taught at RIT, I would have to reserve our TV production studio and enlist the help of numerous technical support people to undertake a project of this magnitude. Until recently, I did not know that this could be done on our campus."
Admissions Tours and Events Calendar
Scheduling prospective student tours is a very important part of the Admissions process. Admissions was using a homegrown antiquated tool for scheduling tours. The trialed a third party web application but the price tag was overwhelming. Margaret Foster approached CIT to see if we could help.
Physics Testing Using Student Owned Computers
The physics faculty use a web-based product called Webassign to give exams to physics students in Newton 202 using the student’s personal laptops on the wireless network through a lockdown browser. Not all that many years ago, this would not have been possible. New wireless technology has allowed for more effective wireless in situations where there is greater device density.
~120 students taking an exam on Thursday, November 10, 2016