• cybersemester flagship empty
  
• cybersemester as vapid campus initiative
  
• get serious; proposed real cyberchanges
  
• wired=ucla, tired=ucb
  
• www.asucb.org answer
  
• is&t&bye

  
  

Introducing the latest speaker in the CyberSemester colloquium course, UGIS 79, the UC Berkeley administrator looked up across the expansive Chan Shen auditorium Wednesday night and found that the audie nce would likely have fit in a 30-seat classroom.

And that's putting it nicely.

The class' failure to generate interest is emblematic of what a floundering effort CyberSemester has become. The plan was to create the university's first "themed" semester; focusing the campus propaganda apparatus, academic communities and sprawling bureaucracy on one subject. That subject, of course, is networked computers. Kind of ironic, considering how utterly clueless the universit y establishment is when it comes to implementing the innovative technologies its scientists and students engineer.

Outside of the Incredible Shrinking UGIS 79, CyberSemester has produced little thus far, even in the way of Press Release Puffery and Seminars & Speeches. Campus officials say Gage will return and k eep his promise to speak as part of the speaker series. But outside of that -- and a revamped campus home page -- the semester seems pretty CyberEmpty.

No whiz-bang technology demonstrations, no new university policies, not even any new empty promises to cling to. Hell, the university hasn't even thrown one red cent at CyberSemester -- not that I'm complaining mind you.

What would help make CyberSemester a real, worthwhile effort? Five ideas:

• Let students serve web pages from their uclink accounts (uclink.berkeley.edu/~login)
• Help the ASUC make Internet-based voting a reality
• Add new modems to the saturated, outmoded campus dial-in annex
• Give CyberSemester a real web address, like cybersemester.berkeley.edu, or www.berkeley.edu/cybersemester (instead of socrates.berkeley.edu/~cybersem)
• Put Tele-Bears online

Take, for instance, UCLA. Their ASU has online apparel ordering. Ours has a big, useless this. Their student newspaper has long had a leading-edge website, while the Daily Cal just took its own quivering leap into the world of online photos this semester (although at least we have our own domain).

The university's main home page, meanwhile, even now fails in making the flat, sprawling array of websites in the berkeley.edu domain intelligible and useful. There must be over 100 different sub-domains. Really. But it's as though the people responsible for running the main home page have picked a select few of those sites as The Important Ones. What results, of course, are a lot of slick pages with few links to the rest of the domain, which it would seem to me was the whole point in the first place. At least there's a search engine.

Thanks to student organizations like the OCF and CSUA, Cal students occasionally get the chance to innovate. But more is needed, and the university needs to be involved .

All it has to do is start listening to its own CyberSpeakers: as Michael Borrus, Co-Director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, pointed last Wednesday in UGIS 79, organizations will be transformed by the network. To make sure that t hat process is a positive one, however, they must integrate the Internet into their own infrastructure, provide it free to everyone in the organization and encourage experimentation. That means drop the draconian regulations on departmental, faculty and t he occasional student home page, provide some web page serving, expand yer modem banks, etc.