I have the following additional comments:
1) If they want us to have some official university header, why haven't they
provided the information on it (e.g., filename-location) so that we can
check it out?
2) The current home pages, to my knowledge, already have the responsible
person to whom comments can be given. I voluntarily asked for input
from Academic Computing
and got some good suggestions. For academic units presenting information
about formal academic programs, I believe that it is appropriate for The
Graduate School to review our home page for content and
accuracy. Since the home page represents the academic unit, before
making it visible, I already ask all of the faculty in the unit to review it
and
provide comments on it. I suggest that a short period (e.g., 2 weeks)
for the Graduate School and anyone else to review the material for
comments and suggestions would be appropriate. The fact that NIU is
already retrograde in its Web presence makes me skeptical about longer
delay. The slowness of the Graduate School, for example, in developing
its own home page, raises questions about their ability to provide timely
input. Much of our content is simply uploaded documents (e.g., Master
and Ph.D. student manuals) that the grad school already use. Do they
require a review of these same documents?
3) It would be nice to know what the Graduate School (and other relevant
academic units such as the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) and other
relevant
units plan on putting into their home pages. It would be a waste of time
for us to computerize the catalogue and other information if they already
doing this. Or, if they can provide us the files to upload, that would
also be helpful. I already raised this question once and received no answer.
(I included a non-existent link to the Grad School in our PA page with
the naive idea that it would be up long before now--when is the Graduate
School page and other pages of other administrative units going to be
available?).
4) Again, many of us working on home pages do so as a labor of love and
due to the fact that we have been embarrassed that our university has
been so slow in this area. Our efforts take away from us devoting time
to teaching and research which determine our raises. The Web is a matter
of strategic importance to a university with declining enrollments. The
slowness of the University in making a presence on the Web will
contribute to further declines in enrollments in an age when elementary
and high school students are already surfing the net and constructing
their own home pages.
Bruce Rocheleau, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, Illinois 60115
(815) 753-6147 (campus)
(815) 756-2169 (home office)
(815) 753-2539 (fax)
BROCHELE@NIU.EDU (My MVS electronic account which I check most days).
Office Hours: Wednesdays 2-4 p.m. and by appointment