Chronicle Online 3/29: Columbia finally offers web page accounts to staff

Columbia finally offers web page accounts to staff
Faculty sites will link to main site

By Jotham Sederstrom
Staff Writer

After many colleges and universities across the country have offered web accounts to faculty members for several years, Columbia has announced the acWeb initiative (acweb.colum.edu) which will be offered to all of its staff and faculty.

According to Academic Computing web expert, Jason Shipley, 20 to 30 faculty members and departments have already began using their accounts, but when more people become interested in the project there will be more additions.

“It’s pretty embryonic at this stage,” said Shipley. “Right now there’s a lot of nitpicking and trouble-shooting.”

Among others, the English, Math and Science Departments as well as the Center for Black Music Research, have all begun to use the service.

Andrea Polli, an Academic Computing artist-in-residence, has used personal websites in her Time-Based Composing II, and Designing for the Web classes. “It’s the only way we could have done it,” said Polli, who used her website in class last fall to document the Millennium Quilt, Ac.colum.edu/ac_alpha/projects/quilt. Twenty Chicago area schools were involved with the quilt, which was presented at the Art Institute in February.

“The thrust of my usage of the sites was that it was out in the community,” said Polli. “It wasn’t sitting in a vacuum that nobody was going to see.”

As dictated by Columbia’s web policy, the sites are intended for educational use or research rather than personal pages or as a vehicle to sell something. Otherwise, there hasn’t been much worry about censoring any of the sites.

More than two years ago, though, an electrical engineering professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Arthur Butz, was involved in a controversy concerning his website. Though, his site displayed revisionist Holocaust views which opined that Nazis never murdered millions of Jews in the concentration camps, the university refused to remove his site, saying the Internet is a free and open forum.

“I suppose something will come up,” said Shipley, referring to questionable material on the web. “Someone will challenge the boundaries of this.”

With 250 computers on the desktops, as compared to about 60 in other departments, Academic Computing is leading the way in computer technology at Columbia. The department is currently running two high speed web servers, and soon threaded discussion groups, chat services, and webcasting will be available.

“The school has come to the conclusion that we’re capable of handling this ourselves,” said Shipley, who is offering instructional workshops to faculty members interested in designing their own sites. “People still aren’t quite ready for this type of technology.”