While WordPress has extensive support for blogging, having a blog on your WordPress site is completely optional. It works very well as a lightweight content management system for any type of website.

To get a better idea of what WordPress can do, you can visit Williams’ sites that were developed using it:

• Finance & Economics – a blog.
• Mathematics & Statistics – a department website that includes a blog.
• Political Science – another department website that includes a blog.
• The Jewish Association – an organization website that contains an events calendar, and no blog.
• Project for Effective Teaching – a cross-department faculty project that contains video, extensive use of topic based categories, and no blog.
• Pioneer Camp – contains a Flash flipbook and Russian translations, and no blog.

Some other cool WordPress features:

• Statistics that can tell you about your site’s traffic & visitors
• Photo galleries
• Multi-level user permissions that can control who can edit what
• Forum-like commenting with automatic spam filtering
• Web forms

If you’d like to find out more about WordPress, contact your Instructional Technology Liaison.

I met with Kaatje White, the Coordinator of the Center, who told me about a variety of projects that Williams is involved with to achieve this goal. One is a year-long writing intensive English class taken by all 9th graders. Williams provides a trained student Writing Fellow for each section of the class, who critiques drafts and supports the class in various ways. Williams also has provided support for curriculum development and new texts for this class. This has allowed Mt. Greylock to focus its resources on keeping class sizes small.

The Center arranges and provides transportation for Williams students to tutor Greylock students, and brings Williams professors and special performances to the high school. Recently James McAllister spoke about Presidential Elections, and Ken Kuttner addressed an assembly on the economic crisis. Two dance workshops with the Jose Limon Dance Company were held in collaboration with the ‘62 Center. In addition, Greylock students are invited to our campus for classes, science labs, library access, speakers, life drawing, and other opportunities which are rare to find in public high schools.

Williams also provides infrastructural support where it can. In addition to providing computers that the school could not otherwise afford, furniture left in Stetson and in other buildings has been donated to the school over the years.

For more information about the Williams Center at Mt. Greylock, visit http://mgrhs.org/ and select ‘Williams Center’ from the navigation on the left. To get involved, contact Kaatje White at kwhite@williams.edu.

The goal is to continue to provide students with the resources they need for classes, but also to add a mechanism that motivates students to cut down on the waste that sometimes happens as a result of unlimited access to printing. Currently students are not charged for paper or printing at any of the campus printers, so there is little motivation to find ways to use less. There are many ways that paper consumption could be reduced: selecting duplex printing, printing only those documents that will be used, reducing the number of flyers printed and finding other ways to advertise events, and editing and reading documents online when possible.

“We want to put an incentive system in place. We don’t want to tell you the best way to cut down on printing because we don’t have the perfect solution. We want people to figure out the solutions that suit them best.”

- Amy Johns, Zilkha Center

OIT has been tracking print jobs through PaperCut since the start of the Fall ‘08 term, to evaluate student printing habits. The exact quota has not yet been determined, but is intended to be sufficient to support academic needs in most cases. Students will only be charged for additional paper if they exceed their quota.

Many details are still under discussion, but here are a few that are unlikely to change:

• Color printouts will cost more than black & white ones.
• Students will be warned well in advance if their quota is low, and given ample opportunity to purchase more printing credits.
• Credits will be purchased by students directly, rather than showing up on their term bill.

For more information about the quota, contact Stephanie Boyd, Director of the Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives.

The College learned a few things from the shutdown. Amy summarized the biggest areas in which we can improve:
“This shutdown was done on fairly short notice. If Williams decides to do another, more notice would almost certainly make things run more smoothly.”
“Mail and package routing was definitely a challenge. To the best of our knowledge, everything ended up getting to the correct destinations, but it took a lot of work and patience.”
“Some of the newer buildings- like Morley – were designed to be very highly conditioned, and there’s no easy way to put them into a passive mode. There’s little or no dead zone between air conditioning and heating, so once the thermostats were set lower, the building went in to cooling mode – drawing in cold outside air and then reheating it, instead of just taking less steam from the heating plant. Facilities learned a lot about those buildings from this shut down, and are working on solutions to that issue.”
Monitoring energy use on campus during the shutdown gave the sustainability team more insight into the consumption patterns of different types of buildings. Most dorms nearly flatlined during the shutdown, which affirmed their assumption that most of the energy used in residential buildings goes into heating, light, and appliances.

Buildings like Jesup saw a much smaller reduction (about 18% less than normal), because essential services were still running- in this case the server room.

Overall, participation was excellent, and the savings from energy costs were nearly three times what was predicted. The Zilkha Center asked me to thank everyone who helped with the shutdown effort on their behalf. So a big thank you to everyone who took the time to pitch in, and faced the inconveniences. Your help was truly appreciated!
OIT’s role
As part of the shutdown, all of the classroom computers needed to be powered down and unplugged. A team of OIT employees made the rounds on Christmas Eve day to turn everything off, and came back early on Sunday the 4th to reboot and test all of the machines before people returned to campus. Out of 80 classrooms, only one computer failed to turn back on. The exercise has Media Services thinking about better ways to design classrooms to accommodate shutdowns- connecting them to a single power source that can be turned off via circuit breakers is being investigated.

Even though Jesup was closed, Desktop staff (Guy Randall and Josh Trivilino) continued to provide support from Hopkins Hall for those who needed to come in during the shutdown.

For more information about sustainability at Williams, visit the sustainability website.

If you’d like to participate in a tutorial…

1. Sign up for the tutorial, like you would any workshop.
2. When you sign up, the instructor is automatically notified.
3. The instructor will contact you to figure out a good time and location to meet.

“I feel strongly that technology doesn’t need to be promoted for its own sake: Technology is opening new opportunities for faculty and changing student expectations of their instructors. The role of the Instructional Technologist is to work with faculty to help them make informed choices as new tools become available.“

“Williams is in a near unique position: Unlike schools that need technology to help distance-education students or students who are having trouble keeping up academically, at a school like Williams the reasons to use new technology in teaching are much more subtle. At Williams, some of the roles of technology are to help already capable students learn deeper or faster, to help faculty use the face time of the classroom better by off-loading material that doesn’t need direct faculty involvement, and, increasingly, to help faculty produce research or teaching tools that just wouldn’t be possible without computer support.”

“The range of services that the ITech group has to offer: Technology is becoming an integral tool of almost every discipline, and the ITech group has staff available to collaborate on many different kinds of projects, such as creating maps and data visualizations, developing presentation materials for conference or classroom use, facilitating communication with peers at other institutions or creating new tools for students to use to grasp complex material. Instructional Technology today is much more about the instruction and publishing than about technology.”

“Short term: Our goals in August and September are always focused around managing a successful start to the school year. New faculty and students show up at the end of August and need to be up and running before the start of classes- it’s a tremendous amount of work concentrated in a two week period. Long term: I hope to take a vacation someday.”

“The goal is to achieve the unattainable balance in computers between ease of use, security, and reliability. And to provide a cooperative, friendly and helpful environment both for the Desktop staff and our patrons.”

“It is clear we need to focus more of our efforts on computer security and training. Unfortunately we now live in a world where viruses, spyware, and phishing scams are money-making tools. Stealing information and identities is a business model. As for staying the same – it is critical that we maintain our human touch.”

“There is hardly an aspect of college life for faculty, staff and students that does not involve computers in some way. Mark Hopkins on a log may be the only exception. So we’ll plan on providing Mark with an iMac.”

“Seeing the forest for the trees is difficult when you are solving so many individual problems a day. Another challenge is that as security concerns arise it is now our responsibility to affect behavioral change in the way people use their computers – I used to just fix hardware.”

“The computer isn’t quite as mysterious as it once was. But if you are unsure about something, check Wikipedia, or Google. You can’t trust everything you read but you can still learn from the experience.”