Our committee

penfield@mtl.mit.edu
Wed Oct 19 08:54:27 1994

The membership of our committee is now firm. Both Chris Kemerer
and Bob Jaffe have responded and agreed to serve. Our major problem
now is finding a time to meet. My secretary Vera Sayzew is going
nuts. I told her to schedule a breakfast meeting, starting at 7:30,
and I would bring the bagels. If that doesn't work, she will try a
dinner meeting.

I am sure we will have to do most of our work in smaller groups or
over the net. I am setting up a home page on the web for us, and
will confer with our gurus about what they would recommend in the
way of private discussion groups, etc. The committee home page
would be "private" in the sense that we would ask that its URL
not be referred to in other web pages, although as you know there
is no such thing as complete privacy on the Internet.

I propose writing a letter to all MIT department heads, telling them
of our committee and asking them to notify us of any activity of
the sort we are interested in going on in their department, and also
to tell us who in their department has the most interest in education
using new technologies. Come to think of it, this letter should
probably also go out to lab directors. Perhaps the right group is
Faculty Council, which consists of those people plus some central
administration. What do you think?

I also intend to send a letter to the faculty in my own department
just to keep them informed about what is going on. Should we
encourage other department heads to do the same?

Please reply to this message and tell me whether you agree with such
letter(s) and if there are particular ideas you think should be in
the letter(s).

Also, I would like to see our final report consist of a hypertext
document on the web with, of course, graphical illustrations. We
could make this an example of some of the technologies that could
be important for education. What do you think of this idea? How
could be work in some interaction in the report? ..../Paul