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These simple tools provided a great way to organize the work of the committee and keep everyone insynch with the progress of the search. It has now been adopted for other searches too.
Posted here, not in above email thread:
Institutional Knowledge Sites – One example being graduate students self-organizing in a department to create a project site to share their materials and additional notes, in order to help future Teaching Assistants (TA's, or Graduate Student Instructors, GSI's) come up to speed on particular courses and teaching with particular instructors.
Our graduate student body is about to experience large turnover with
nearly 1/3 of us graduating in the coming months. We are in serious
danger of losing institutional knowledge on teaching. One of the
frequent complaints of GSIs in our department has been the
unavailability of past teaching materials for courses when the previous
GSI has graduated. To address this problem, we created a [USER:Sakai]
classroom repository with folders for all of the commonly taught
undergraduate courses in our department*. This repository contains
activities, labs, and other resources, forming continuity from GSI to GSI.To ensure that we don't lose valuable knowledge when you graduate, we
encourage you to take just a few minutes to visit the course repository
and upload useful information from the courses you have taught. If you
are currently a GSI, you should already have access to the site. If you
are not a GSI but would like access to upload materials, simply reply to
this email.*Keep in mind that all GSIs have accessed to these resources, so
sensitive material like keys should probably not be posted for courses
which might be taken by graduate students.