The easiest thing is just to have this as a mailing list. I'm not
sure what else the web adds to it, unless you expect people to include
hypertextlinks in their messages. If you really insist, there's a
simple mail filter that can convert a mail archive to a web page.
That's what I use for archiving the class discussionlist for my
course. The advantage is that not everyone needs to keep copies of
all the messages. But I don't think that's a consideration for a small
group such as ours.
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?
That sounds fine. Notice from today's Tech Talk, that MIT seems to
already have hired someone whose job it is to help departments
"webify". We need better coordination with IS, which I hope that Greg
Jackson will supply. In any case, you ought to talk this over with
Jim Bruce.
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?
Sure, but let's be careful about getting into a mode where we have to
sift through a lot of suggestions. Between now and January is a
pretty short fuse.
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?
This sounds superfluous to me. Between now and January leaves no time
to actually develop stuff. I suppose it might be interesting to
provide active links to things the report might mention. Not that
this is all pretty easy to do at the last minute. For instance, you
can write the report in Latex and pass in through the Latex2HTML
filter.