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Local and online events of particular interest to FCN members (see also On Campus below)
BLACKBOARD COURSEINFO. The UO Library is offering a new experimental service for instructors interested in putting their courses on line. Check out the Blackboard CourseInfo course management system at <http://blackboard.uoregon.edu>. Using just a web browser, you can add an online component to your classes, or even host an entire course on the Web -- without knowing any HTML! You can quickly create your own virtual classroom, bringing your learning materials, class discussions, and even tests online. Blackboard has been very successful at numerous other universities. Now you have a chance to use it here at UO. For more information about the service, including extensive online help to get you started, see <http://libweb.uoregon.edu/fittc/blackboard/>.
DARKWING SYSTEM UPGRADE. The Computing Center is planning a major hardware upgrade to darkwing and gladstone this weekend.. Expect darkwing to be down for several hours as files are moved from the old to the new system. In addition to upgrading hardware, the Computing Center also plans to make some configuration changes that will effect mail and web publishing on darkwing. Among the changes:
SUMMER IT CURRICULUM. Here's a partial list. See <http://libweb.uoregon.edu/it/>.
Web Publishing II
Thu Aug 5 12:00pm - 1:50pm EC (rescheduled from July 31)
Web Design Principles and Practices
Tue Aug 3 2:00pm - 3:50pm RSR
Web Programming II: Javascript
Fri Jul 30 12:00pm - 1:50pm RSR
FITT CENTER. Please alert your colleagues to the Faculty Instructional Technology Training Center. They can get personal support and training in the use of instructional technology and multimedia. Monday-Friday, 11am-6pm, in Media Services Room 18 on the ground floor of Knight Library. We've only been open a month, and have already served more than 75 faculty from more than 2 dozen departments. <http://libweb.uoregon.edu/fittc/>.
800 MILLION SITES, AND GROWING. That's the current estimate for the size of the Web, according to an article published in Nature, July 8. And the search engines aren't keeping up -- the most complete search engines, such as Northern Light and AltaVista, index only about 16% of the total, a significantly smaller percentage than they did a year ago. <http://www.wwwmetrics.com>.
UNIVERSITIES DEVELOPING ONLINE BUSINESS CURRICULUM. Stanford University, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the London School of Economics have all partnered to offer online courses through Internet startup UNext.com. The courses offered through UNext.com will target overseas business professionals that do not have access to quality higher education, and will use a version of Lotus Notes. Lotus parent IBM has agreed to be UNext.com's first customer, and will begin selling the offering to its corporate customers. UNext.com will being offering courses in finance and accounting in the fall. (Business Journal of San Jose 07/12/99; from EduPage 14 July 99).
RESTRUCTURING NEW MEDIA SUPPORT. Columbia University plans to create a new institution -- one it says will be uniquely suited to Internet publishing -- by bringing scholarly publishers, librarians, and technologists from all around its campus together in a New Media Center for Electronic Publishing. (Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/20/99) <http://www.chronicle.com/daily/99/07/99072001t.htm>.
PERSISTANT CONVERSATION. If you're interested in the cutting edge of research on computer-mediated conversation, check out the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication Volume 4, No. 4 A Special Issue on "Persistent Conversation". <http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue4/>.
TEACHING CENTERS. Alan Levine of Maricopa Community Colleges <http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu> provides the following links to lists of "teaching centers" at institutions around the world:
If you use a Unix system such as darkwing, you have a home directory. When you refer to files in your home directory, you can often get away with shortcuts: if you specify just the file name, it refers to a file in your currently connected directory, which is usually the same as your home directory; from the shell command line you can refer to a file named "filename" in your home directory using "~/filename" or "$HOME/filename". But sometimes you need to include the full path name (starting with "/") of a file in your home directory in another file. That can be a problem if your home directory changes.
For example, the Computing Center is planning a major system upgrade this weekend. In the process, they report that they will be moving people's home directories to different disks, hence changing their path names..
Since darkwing doesn't implement any standard naming convention (on some systems you are guaranteed to be able to refer to a user's home directory as /home/user), you need to avoid had-coding full path names whenever you can. If you write a perl program that needs to use a full path name, it can figure it out at run time rather than having you write it as part of the program. But that doesn't work in all cases.
On darkwing, typical examples of files that often have hard-coded pathnames include mhonarc configuration files in your home directory (e.g. .mhonarc.listname containing the full path to .mhonarc.listname.authorrc), .htaccess files in public_html subdirectories used to password-protect a web site (containing the full path to the password file), and configuration files for some ftp clients on PCs and Macs (e.g. Claris Home Page, Netscape Composer).
If your home directory changes, you need to change these files. For example, suppose your old home directory was /home7/jqj, and that you have a subdirectory named public_html/private that is password protected, with a password file stored in your home directory. After the home directory is changed, log in to darkwing using telnet, find out your new home directory (using the pwd command), and edit public_html/private/.htaccess to change the path. You might have a typescript something like this:
SunOS 5.6 login: jqj Password: darkwing% pwd /home37/jqj darkwing% pico public_html/private/.htaccess
In that file, you'd probably find a line that read "AuthFileName /home7/jqj/htpasswd". You'd use the editor to change it to "AuthFileName /home37/jqj/htpasswd" and you'd be done.
Some FTP clients on PCs and Macs also store full path names for remote systems. For example, when you use the "Upload" feature of Claris Home Page 3.0 and choose an upload destination using the "Browse" button in Set FTP Options, it sets the remote folder to the full path name. Bad! After your home directory changes, you'll need to repeat the "Set FTP Options" to reset the remote directory before you'll be able to upload a new copy of your html file.
This space highlights new conferences of particular interest to UO faculty interested in educational technology. For more meetings see <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/fcn/conferences.html>.
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Online workshops:
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I hear that Microsoft has started selling ad space on its error messages. The ad space obviously can command premium rates.
The UO Faculty Consultants Network Newsletter is published (approximately)
once a month. If you have materials for inclusion in the newsletter you can
send them to <mailto:jqj@darkwing>.
This newsletter (as well as other FCN-related material) is available on line
in <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/fcn/news/>.