Hi Russell. Interesting thoughts. The Associated Colleges has, since Cross-Registration was implemented in the 1970's, used the terms "home" and "host" without any complaints - so I guess we (or me, since I designed the new form with input from the registrar's offices and chief academic officers at each of the four colleges, as well as a handful of CU personnel) never realized it might have been an issue! I would hesitate to send a draft form out campus wide for review and criticism as I fear it would take several years to agree upon a final draft! However for future form revisions, I will attempt to involve a larger variety of disciplines.

The Home/Host question was especially confusing when developing the employee cross-registration form, since an employee may be employed at one institution, matriculated at a second, and taking a course at a third. I'm not sure if you viewed the employee form (perhaps it doesn't pertain to you), but we did take care to define "home" and "host" directly on the form for clarity. We can certainly do the same on the student version of the form to avoid confusion.

Jennifer Stokes Assistant Registrar VA Certifying Official Clarkson University

AIM: CUJenniferL  Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail

-----Original Message----- From: general_discussion-bounces@lists.clarkson.edu [mailto:general_discussion-bounces@lists.clarkson.edu] On Behalf Of Russell Nelson Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 11:16 AM To: general_discussion@lists.clarkson.edu Subject: [CU Discussion] Cross registration document

We recently received an announcement about a new cross registration policy. Couple of complaints about it, both of them trivial but hopefully larger than that.

As a computer scientist, we have learned that people read the beginnings and endings (mostly beginnings), so we have learned not to use names with opposite meanings that begin with the same few letters. So naming them "home" and "host" when the words have opposite meanings is not optimal. How could this have been avoided? By asking "Who at Clarkson could help improve this document?" before publishing it. Probably wouldn't be obvious to ask the computer science folks, but the technical writing might have known.

And as a Clarkson graduate with an advanced degree who wrote a thesis, Dave Bray beat it into me (thank you, Dave) to define my terms (which this document did), but then to use them in the document as defined, which this document didn't do, putting "host" and "home" into quotes. It's a nit, BUT it's another sign that Clarkson doesn't eat its own dog food. We have excellent teachers -- why don't we ask them for help? Don't we trust ourselves? Don't we believe in ourselves?

See why I think these are more than just nits and worthy of discussion? _______________________________________________ General_Discussion mailing list General_Discussion@lists.clarkson.edu http://lists.clarkson.edu/mailman/listinfo/general_discussion To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.clarkson.edu/mailman/, select this list and use the 'unsubscribe or edit options' button at the bottom of the page.