ACADEMIC COMPUTING PRACTICE Report

ACADEMIC COMPUTING PRACTICE

The Academic Computing Practice seeks to promote and enable MIT education through the effective use of computers and other information technologies. Collaborating with I/T Process teams and in partnership with academic departments, the Academic Computing Practice provides widely distributed client-server computing designed to facilitate undergraduate education, primarily through the Athena Computing environment, which is used by thousands of users each day and over 10,000 different people on peak days. Academic Computing provides advocacy, training, documentation, and consulting services to support academic work.

During fiscal year 1996, the Academic Computing Practice focused its resources on activities aimed at strengthening the infrastructure for educational computing:

* It continued to encourage new instructional uses of Athena. In the past year, MIT's suite of educational software was enlarged to include molecular modeling software for Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, and Materials Science, as well as rendering and graphics software for Architecture and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

* Academic Computing also assisted faculty interested in using the World Wide Web in novel ways to enhance instruction, helping them digitally animate natural phenomena for use in Physics classes, and helping them create and publish digital images for educational use in the departments of Architecture, Foreign Languages and Literatures, and the Health Sciences and Technology (HST) Program. MAE (Macintosh emulation) was provided on Sun workstations in various Athena clusters to support the needs of faculty using Macintosh software in classes.

* In partnership with I/T Support teams, the Academic Computing Practice introduced a "moveable workstation" service, through which faculty members may obtain a Silicon Graphics workstation with projection capabilities for use in any classroom equipped with a network drop.

* Working with the Athena Computing Environment Software Release Delivery team, the Academic Computing Practice continued its annual renewal of Athena equipment, purchasing workstations and peripherals to replace aging equipment, and purchasing additional functionality for older machines to address the emerging computational needs of MIT subjects. A new Athena cluster was added in the Rotch Library in fiscal 1996, and the 4-035 cluster was equipped with twenty SGI Indy machines as a specialized facility for classes.

* Academic Computing enhanced IS's constituent relationships by participating in a number of joint projects with groups such as the Public Service librarians from the MIT Libraries, the Educational Technology Council, and the Development Office.

* To improve communication on campus, the Academic Computing Practice introduced WebMeet, a Web-based conferencing and electronic mail archiving system. To extend the spirit of that communication outside MIT, the Academic Computing Practice continued to host a variety of visitors from organizations worldwide who express interest in Athena and MIT's educational computing environment.

Dr. Vijay Kumar succeeded Dr. Gregory Jackson as Director, Academic Computing Practice.

M.S. Vijay Kumar