Association of Small Computer Users in Education
February 1998

Highlights

ASCUE '98

The unusually mild temperatures in the Northeast have me dreaming of those June evenings in Myrtle Beach! At least we've made it into the same calendar year now!

The deadline for presentation proposals nears as I write this column. Proposals have started to arrive on my desk and in my e-mail, and if these early examples are any indication, we should have a pretty exciting and varied program for 1998. ASCUE will follow this newsletter with a Registration edition of the newsletter which will include registration materials as well as abstracts of all accepted papers. Look for that in the spring.

For now, several members of the board begin to tackle the numerous details and tasks that make up the planning process for a conference such as ASCUE. As the process moves along, we'll be sure to keep you abreast of the details. Mention the conference to a colleague at one or two of the schools around you who haven't sent representatives in the past. If you spark interest in someone, be sure to forward name and address information along and I'll be sure it gets forwarded so their name appears on our mailing list.

Remember, the ASCUE conference website can be found at:
http://www.gettysburg.edu/ascue

We will be adding material as it becomes available, so this will probably be the most up to date location for information.

For those of you who need to get an early start on planning, here is some preliminary information about the conference. ASCUE'98 will run from June 7-11; the theme will be "Harnessing the Net: Creating the Campus Intranet."

The registration fee for the conference will be $140 for the first member from a college, $120 for additional members, and $165 for a corporation. Room rates will be $75, $87, and $113 per night for a Studio, 1 bedroom, and 2 bedroom, respectively. Two bedroom tower units will be $167 and three bedroom tower units will be $185 per night.

If you have any questions or require additional information about the conference, please feel free to contact me at (717) 337-6933 (voice), (717) 337-6666 (fax), and email address wilson@gettysburg.edu

This year we hope to add a golf outing (I am reluctant to call it a tournament) following the conference. Keep alert for upcoming announcements about this new event.

ASCUE'98 PreConference Workshops

Carl Singer

As in previous years, we are offering preconference workshops on Sunday, June 7, 1998. One of these workshops, "Managing in Difficult Times,"($80) will be an all-day workshop, 9:00am - 4:00pm. The presenters will be Carl Singer and Carol Smith from Depauw University. It will discuss how to use team building tools and strategies to manage computing services departments and to relate to customers.

As of now there are three other workshops planned. The first, "Finding and Evaluating Information on the Internet," presented by Dennis Trinkle, will have two sessions. The first session, 9:00 - 11:00am, ($20) will present background material to those taking the other two workshops, "Home Page Development and Design,"($60) presented by Steve Anderson, and "Using Web Course in a Box to Get Faculty on the Net,"($60) presented by Nancy Thibeault, Janet Hurn, and Eric DeBrosse. These latter two workshops will be held from 11:00am - 4:00pm. The Dennis Trinkle workshop will present new material in a second session ($20) from 11:00 to noon for those who do not wish to take the Home Page or Web Course workshops.

ASCUE "Old-Timer" Profile: Wally Roth

Peter Smith

This is the first in our series of profiles of ASCUE pioneers. If any of you know any other long-time members of ASCUE, please talk to them and write up their story for the newsletter. We will all benefit from knowing how hard these committed people worked to build the organization.

Wally Roth, Taylor University professor, has been with ASCUE and its predecessor CUETUG since 1968. He has been program chair twice, the last time in 1985, the year before we started coming to Myrtle Beach. (To give you some idea how the organization has grown, there were only 26 attendees at the 1985 conference which was held at Taylor. The next year we moved to Myrtle Beach and the rest is history.) He held the Public Relations job on the board for most of the early ASCUE years. It was under his direction that the ASCUE newsletter was first published.

He always has a smile for everyone, and has been a wonderful encouragement for younger folks as they begin their ASCUE careers. Although we differ in age by only one year, I have only belonged to ASCUE since 1986. Wally was very supportive as I gave my first presentation at ASCUE and later when we shared the ASCUE slot at the NECC Conference. He has been unable to attend the last four or five conferences for one reason or another - grading the CS AP exam, taking a trip to Alaska with his wife, and spending last year's sabbatical in Lithuania. Before 1992, he had attended nearly all 25 ASCUE/CUETUG conferences.

Wally grew up in Central Illinois and his pastor was a Taylor University alumnus, so Wally chose to attend this small Christian college in the middle of the corn fields in central Indiana. He majored in Math as there was no Computer Science in the late 50's. He was married soon after he graduated and he and his wife stayed on for three years as head residents in the residence halls at Taylor while Wally completed a Masters in Applied Math at Ball State. He was offered an assistantship at Ohio State in 1962 to begin a PhD program and one of his first assignments was at the computation center where several grad students experimented with the newly-obtained IBM computer. It was here that Wally fell in love with computers, an attraction that continues to this day.

After three years, since Ohio State offered no degree in Computer Science and his expanding family was demanding more than a grad student's salary, he left the PhD program and took a job at Malone College for a couple of years. To allow his students access to a computer, he procured a key punch machine which did not print any words on the cards and a machine which accepted a deck of cards and printed a listing. When the students thought they had a correct program, Wally had made an arrangement with a local bank for the students use the bank's computer for several hours in the evenings. It is hard to imagine the hardships that these early students and teachers were forced to go through to learn programming.

Taylor University beckoned again to Wally in 1967 when the president promised that he would procure a computer for the college and make academic use its highest priority. The computer was an IBM 1130 with 8 meg of memory. Memory was so expensive in those days that the college had to save for two years to get a second 8 meg. One soon learned to be a very efficient programmer with the 1130.

The summer before Wally started his duties as instructor and academic and administrative computer director, Taylor sent him to an IBM training class in Detroit where he met Jack Cundiff and some of the other 1130 users who had formed CUETUG (College and University Eleven Thirty Users Group) earlier that year. He also got out of Detroit just in time, as the riots of '67 started the evening he left.

The next year, Wally attended his first CUETUG conference at Principia College in Tulsa, Illinois. He found it very helpful, especially in his role as computer center director. As the years have gone by, he has found himself supported by a three-legged organizational stool: ASCUE/CUETUG for practical suggestions and helpful colleagues in the computer support area, CCUC/NECC for ideas in incorporating computers throughout the curriculum, and ACM/SIGCSE for theoretical Computer Science ideas. For most of the first 25 years at Taylor, Wally and his family attended all three conferences. One year he took a night flight back from the San Diego NECC conference and started the drive to Myrtle Beach at 4am that morning.

Wally became interested in minority colleges when John Hamblen convinced ASCUE to come to Georgia Tech so that faculty from predominantly black colleges could attend. When it came time for a sabbatical in 75-76, Wally spent it at Navaho Com munity College in Arizona. This was the only Native American college in existence at the time. He spent the two summers after that teaching BASIC to African American faculty through an NSF program in New Orleans. During his most recent sabbatical last year, Wally and his wife went to Lithuania where he taught Computer Literacy and also programming in C++ to very eager students in that developing country. He can't wait to go back there again this coming summer.

After the 75-76 sabbatical, Wally gave up his academic and administrative computer center director hats (he was replaced by two people) and concentrated on teaching. A Lilly grant had helped him set up Taylor's Computer Science major and hire several faculty in 1973. His real love was and is working with students, helping them grow in both computing knowledge and confidence. Another area of interest is ethics. Wally has written a number of modules which can be used in engineering and computer courses to help students wrestle intelligently with ethical decisions. His parting message about ASCUE: the conference comes at a perfect time of year; we have survived another year and are ripe for new ideas before starting to plan for the next one.

Wally is approaching his retirement years and looking forward to traveling and visiting his six grandchildren and, of course, getting to at least one more ASCUE conference to renew old acquaintances and encourage a new group of ASCUE members. We all hope that conference comes soon. Thanks for all you have done for ASCUE, Wally.