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Local and online events of particular interest to FCN members (see also On Campus below)
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NEW DUCKWARE AVAILABLE SOON. The 1999 DuckWare CD-ROM (produce by the Micro Support group at the Computing Center) has gone to the disk duplicators, and will be available for the start of fall term. We'll have a new distribution mechanism for faculty since there are now two different CDs -- one for Macintosh and one for Windows. Instead of our mailing copies to everyone, you can pick up your copy of whichever disk(s) you actually need at any of several locations:
UO STUDENT DRAWS FIRST NET PIRACY CONVICTION. In the first successful prosecution under the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997, Jeffrey Gerard Levy, 22, a senior at the University of Oregon was convicted of a felony based on a web site he maintained where anyone could download pirated copies of music, movies, and software. (Reuters, August 20, 1999). The FBI was alerted by the UO Computing Center when it noted unusually heavy traffic on Levy's site. For more, see the Chronicle of Higher Education story, <http://chronicle.com/free/99/08/99082601t.htm>.
BLACKBOARD NOW AT RELEASE 3.0. The Library has upgraded its CourseInfo web server to version 3.0. Even more features for a course web site! If you're interested in learning more about this software, or considering using it to support your course, visit the FITT Center web site. <http://libweb.uoregon.edu/fittc/blackboard/>
NETSCAPE'S BROWSER SHARE NOW 25 PERCENT. Netscape's Navigator browser is continuing to lose ground to Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) according to a new study from WebSideStory, which found that Netscape now holds just 25 percent of the browser market. Just this March Netscape had more than a third of the browser market, but the number of users has dwindled as many are defecting to IE, which the study says has 75.3 percent of the market. (PC World Online 08/09/99; quoted from EduPage, 11 Aug 99).
WELCOME TO COLLEGE. NOW MEET OUR SPONSOR. "Starting today, when students at Appalachian State University check their e-mail or course outlines on line, they will be looking at advertising from dozens of companies including Amazon.com, Dell Computer and an apartment-locator service called SpringStreet. Something similar will be happening soon at Villanova University, the University of Memphis, the University of Oregon, the University of Idaho and more than 500 other institutions that have signed up commercial companies to run campus Web sites and e-mail services." That's how a story in the NY Times (8/17/99) begins. Tom Hager (UO's Director of Communications), asked for a retraction in a letter to the NY Times, and noted "The UO has agreed only to help beta-test Campus Pipeline software with a small fraction of our students in order to permit the campus to evaluate whether this product offers us long term benefits." Allowing commercial control of the Web pages and e-mail services of what was once considered a sacred domain--academia--is resulting in contentious debate.
WIRED ON CAMPUS E-LIFE Many students are beginning to pick universities based on how "wired" they are, according to a recent article in USA Today. This is because students are performing more functions online, from registering for classes and communicating with professors to ordering take-out, than ever before. Of the 15 million students currently attending a college, 60 percent say they go online daily, and 85 percent of students own their own computers, according to research firm Student Monitor. The company predicts that university students will spend $700 million online during the next school year, and over $4 billion online annually by 2002. (USA Today 08/19/99; quoted from EduPage, 20 Aug 99).
WEB ADDICTION. A psychologist who used data volunteered by 17,251 users of the ABC News site abcnews.com has concluded that almost 6% of Internet users suffer from some form of addiction to it. The psychologist, David Greenfield, says: "Marriages are being disrupted, kids are getting into trouble, people are committing illegal acts, people are spending too much money." The study asked questions such as whether participants had used the Internet to escape problems, had tried unsuccessfully to cut back their Internet use, or found themselves preoccupied with the Internet even when they were not actively using it. (AP/Tampa Tribune 23 Aug 99; quoted from NewScan Daily, 23 Aug 99).
IS THE WEB SHRINKING? Although the number of Web sites is expanding daily, the number of sites that people actually visit is shrinking, according to research conducted for the Los Angeles Times. According to Media Matrix, 35% of Web surfers' time is spent on the 50 most popular sites, up from about 27% last year. The top 10 sites garnered about 20% of all time spent on the Web. (Los Angeles Times 23 Aug 99; quoted from NewScan Daily, 23 Aug 99)
If you're planning to take photos with a digital camera or scan images for use on the web, one issue is what resolution to scan at. For web use, you really only need an effective 72 ppi (pixels per inch), since that's the resolution typical of most monitors. If you scan 3" wide photo at 300 ppi, then you'll end up with a file 900 pixels wide -- wider than a typical computer screen.
If the only thing you plan to do with your digital photos is display them on web pages, then you can scan at 72 ppi. A low resolution photo will appear clear and vibrant on a web page, and the smaller file size of each photo will enable you to take more pictures.
On the other hand, if you plan on printing your pictures to paper, then you'll want to use a higher resolution, say 300 ppi or 600 ppi. That results in much larger file sizes and slower scans. But it's the right approach in many cases, particularly when you aren't sure what you plan to use your images for -- it's generally easier to scan once at high resolution then reduce the resolution for web publishing than it is to rescan a photo when you discover 6 weeks later that you wanted to use it in print. And having a high resolution master copy gives you an image that you can crop and resize to exactly the format you want using an image editing program.
By the way, for web publishing you'll probably want to save your photos as JPEG, with a "compression" or "quality" setting as low as possible. Settings of 25 (on a scale where 100 is best) are often completely adequate for web pages, and result in very highly compressed files, hence fast download times for your viewers. But you should save your archival copies in TIFF or Windows BMP format, since saving files as JPEG is "lossy" -- it throws away some information in order to achieve good file compression. Saving multiple times in JPEG format can result in a "copy of a copy of a copy" image degradation, so always go back to your original when you want to make changes.
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>.
Online workshops:
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An important observation about lectures from Enrico Fermi (1901-1954):
Never underestimate the joy people derive from hearing something they already know.
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