Minutes

Faculty Meeting and Workshop

Spanish-American Institute

May 18, 2002

Convened: The Faculty Meeting convened at 10:10 am. An attendance list and an e-mail update list were passed around. 26 faculty, the President, and the Academic Dean attended.

President’s Report: Mr. Ferraro welcomed and thanked everyone for his or her cooperation during the State Department of Higher Education site visit. He indicated that we are awaiting the State report and recommendations.

Librarian's Report: Dr. Prager reported for Laurie Kaplan. She stated that cataloguing of the initial collection is almost complete. She passed out a list of recent acquisitions for faculty review and informed everyone that such library news and features from now on will be listed on-line at the Library's new web page.

Chair Reports:

Computer Technology—Khalid El-Harmassi reported that computer applications faculty have been working more closely together on developing exams. He also commented on the importance of today's faculty development workshop in the Information Age where everyone needs to know how to find information and how to use it.

ESL—Radha Krishnamoorthy thanked ESL faculty for submitting copies of tests and student writing for the State visit. She encouraged faculty to continue teaching towards and testing for the four language skills.

Academic Dean's Report: Dr. Prager stressed that more Institute students are taking standardized college-entrance tests that require essay writing. Most essays will be e-scored by computer. The correlation between machine and human scoring of essays is quite high. In addition to correct use of language, the computer looks for mature writing characteristics such as longer more complex sentence structure, more complex vocabulary, transition, etc.

The Dean thanked Mr. El Harmassi for his work on developing a new school web site. She indicated that the web site provides faculty access to Spanish-American Institute instructional, library, and other resources on-line. The Institute's information literacy resources are comparable in kind to those found at other postsecondary schools and colleges. The school's information resources provide additional tools for teaching and learning.

Faculty Meeting Adjournment and Faculty Development Workshops: The Faculty Meeting adjourned at 11:10 p.m. and faculty reconvened at 11:20 a.m. for the Information Literacy Workshop. The Computer Technology chairperson demonstrated the Spanish-American Institute's new web site and the components of the Library web page. Faculty also received a handout summarized the Institute's information literacy resources. Following the demonstration workshop, faculty broke into smaller groups to discuss how they might develop information literacy activities within courses to reinforce language or program learning. Radha Krishnamoorthy facilitated the discussion among ESL faculty. Leonila Dolina served as recorder and Yelena Boreyko as Library resource for the ESL session. Khalid El Harmassi facilitated discussion among Computer, Accounting, and Business faculty; Lilliam Hernandez served as recorder for that session.