Monthly Archives: June 2011

Attendees
Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Curtis Izen, Ellen Kaufman, Rita Ormsby, Bruce Small, Mike Waldman, Kevin Wolff

Today’s meeting was a discussion of ways we could cut back on the amount of printing by students, faculty, and staff on campus. We started off by looking at student printing and whether the file types most commonly printed–Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF. We considered a variety of ideas and issues:

• what if we could distribute more e-reader devices that would hold all the items on reserve (copyright issues would likely ensue)?
• students want to annotate and highlight what they read, which is easy to do if they have printed copies; what software programs do we have now that easily allow students to markup electronic files as they read and then save that annoated version? can annotations made in Adobe Acrobat Reader be saved or do you need to use a separate PDF reader to get that function?
• can we tinker with the default printing options for PowerPoint files so they automatically print out multiple slides on page (probably n0t)?
• can we reward students in some way if they have still have unused print credits at the end of the semester?
• can faculty who expect students to bring printed copies of PowerPoint slide sets to class find other ways to have the material in front of students during class?
• if we had Blackboard set up so it would work on mobile devices, would that encourage more students to download course handouts, etc. on their phones for reading instead of printing them?