What's New
New Faculty Workstations
Although it may seem at times that nothing ever changes in the Media Center, faculty returning to the Department's finest (and only) computing center now have the option of sitting at a faculty workstation that has some serious power under the hood. This is because the two faculty workstations, Kiev and Chernobyl, have been replaced by two state-of-the-art Dell XPS 420 units equipped with 1GB of RAM, 250 GB Hard drives, 256 Mb ATI Graphics Cards, 1GB Ethernet connections to the internet, and Optical Drives capable of buring DVDs at 20X. The new workstations are much faster and more capable than the workstations they replace and boast a much better looking glossy black finish that puts the equipment around them to shame. Gone are the now dated floppy drives from these two workstations, replaced instead by two USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, and a bank of memory card readers able to accomodate virtually every memory card ever manufactured.
Despite the cutting edge nature of these two workstations, there is much that has not changeed about them. Both rely on the same flat panel monitors that the old units did and both are running Windws XP instead of Windows Vista. However if first impressions count for anything, these two workstations promise to be winners in the race to help bring the best foreign language instruction available anywhere into the UD classroom. - Tomás
A New Addition to Faculty Web Pages
Awareness of the benefits to the Department and its programs, of student access to information about faculty, has prompted the FLMC Web development group to begin offering all faculty the opportunity to have portraits of themselves placed on their Departmental web pages. The portraits will not only help students to identify FLL faculty members teaching their foreign language and FLLT courses, but they may also help to bring students closer to faculty by reducing the level of faculty anonymity.
Portraits may be submitted as physical photographs to Tom McCone or sent as electronic images to tmccone@udel.edu where they will be resized to fit the FLL faculty web page template. Several faculty portraits have already been successfully deployed, adding color and warmth to the pages on which they appear. Faculty are encouraged to visit the faculty pages of Drs. Bonnie Robb and Richard Zipser to note the affects such portraits have on faculty web pages.
It should be stressed that faculty are under no obligation to have pictures of themselves posted on FLL faculty web pages. Having them posted is purely a matter of individual choice.
Tomás
