Don't read this by e-mail! Instead, read the hypertext version of this newsletter: <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/fcn/news/current.html>. Contents:
The IT Curriculum for summer includes a variety of workshops of potential interest to FCN members. Here are some of the most relevant in the next 3 weeks; for the full schedule see <http://libweb.uoregon.edu/it/>.
Wednesday, July 2 10:00 am - 11:20 am EC Beyond Just Surfing Monday, July 7 10:00 am - 11:20 am EC Introduction to Lexis/Nexis Wednesday, July 9 11:00 am - 12:20 pm EC Introduction to the Internet 3:30 pm - 4:50 pm IMCB Practicing Safe Computing 6:00 pm - 7:50 pm EC Introduction to Web Publishing Thursday, July 10 1:00 pm - 2:50 pm RSR Intermediate Web Publishing: More HTML Tuesday, July 15 11:00 am - 12:20 pm EC Beyond Just Surfing Wednesday, July 16 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm EC Introduction to Lexis/Nexis 3:30 pm - 4:50 pm IMCB System Maintenance & Troubleshooting: MacOS Thursday, July 17 10:00 am - 11:50 am ITC Web Publishing with Claris Home Page 1:00 pm - 2:50 pm RSR Intermediate Web Publishing: Images on the Web Tuesday, July 22 1:00 pm - 1:50 pm EC Using IP/TV to Broadcast a Special Event
A serious security problem was recently discovered with Netscape Navigator (all versions from 2.0 through 4.0) that allows an unscrupulous site to download any file from your Mac or PC hard disk without your knowledge. Since the attacker needs to know the full path name of the file, this bug is more likely to be exploited on PCs than on Macs. Due to the severity of the problem, Nestcape has been working overtime to fix the bug, and has released fixes for some versions.
Version 4.01 fixes the bug. A bugfix release for people who want to stay with 3.0 is expected sometime in July. No bugfixes are expected for Netscape 2.0; Netscape recommends that you upgrade to a more recent version!
As of today, Netscape version 4.01 (aka "Communicator") is available for Windows 95/NT and Windows 3.1, with a Macintosh version expected later this week. You can get it from <ftp://ftp.uoregon.edu/netscape/communicator/4.01/shipping/english/>. If you've already installed 4.0 on a PC, use the Java-based updater at windows/windows95_or_nt/smartupdate/.
For more information on the security problem, see the discoverer's (Christian Orellana) description,<http://www.cabocomm.dk/>, or Netscape: <http://www.netscape.com/flash1/misc/security_update.html>
PointCast pushes onto college campuses. Internet "push" technology pioneer PointCast is developing the PointCast College Network, which will enable university administrators to feed announcements and other information to all the computers on a campus so that the students working in a lab, for instance, will see messages alerting them to new parking policies or entertainment events on campus. The company plans to supply free software to the campuses and will provide a new set of channels aimed at the college crowd, offering news and entertainment. (Chronicle of Higher Education 6 Jun 97; from EduPage, 5 June 1997)
Electronic publishing and tenure. A Rutgers U. committee on electronic publishing and tenure has published a significant report surveying current academic practice and making recommendations. One paragraph in the Summary portion of the document reads,
"The Committee regards electronic dissemination as having all the capabilities to be as legitimate a form of publication as print. We urge a focus on content and quality review processes rather than on medium or format, and we suggest flexibility and common sense in interpreting the value of new publication modes."
The report is available at <http://aultnis.rutgers.edu/texts/ept.html>.
What Does Research Tell Us About Technology and Higher Learning? Take a look at an article by Stephen C. Ehrmann, "Asking the Right Question". It's an excellent review of the current literature. <http://www.learner.org/content/ed/strat/eval/ACPBRightQuestion.html> Ehrmann begins:
I've got two pieces of bad news about the experimental English composition course where students used computer conferencing. The first bad news is that, over the course of the semester, the experimental group showed no progress in their ability to compose an essay. The second piece of bad news is that the control group, taught by traditional methods, showed no progress either. - Paraphrased from a talk by Roxanne Hiltz reporting on an early use of computer conferencing
Ivy League eyes distance learning. Elite private institutions are beginning to compete for distance learning dollars, focusing initially on offering continuing education courses to alumni and professionals in need of further educational opportunities. Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Duke, Rice and Stanford Universities are just a few that have recently created or expanded their distance learning opportunities, and Yale and the University of Chicago are considering similar moves. Behind the momentum is the fear of losing out on the next big thing in education: "You could be, at some point, like the Post Office, watching Federal Express and UPS taking away a piece of your business," says the vice-provost for information systems and computing at the University of Pennsylvania. But distance learning courses at Ivy League prices are a difficult sell: "The one thing (Ivy League schools) sell is that the people sitting next to you are smart people. (They haven't figured out) how to recruit a comparatively talented pool over the Internet." Still, most schools are coming to the realization that some type of electronic learning program is essential to future survival. "This is evidence that there's money to be made in this business," says Jim Mingle, executive director of the State Higher Education Executive Officers. "This is a search for new markets." (Chronicle of Higher Education 20 Jun 97; from Edupage, 19 June 1997 )
Web Accessibility for Disabled. In a recent posting to the AAHESGIT listserv, Prof Norman Coombs of EASI and RIT <mailto:NRCGSH@ritvax.isc.rit.edu> writes:
The latest decisions by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) make it clear that colleges and universities are legally bound to provide equal access to the web and to that institution's information. This means that just as you have to have ramps for wheelchairs, you need web design that enables access for the print disabled. For info on some recent OCR cases, look at <http://www.rit.edu/~easi/law.html>. [6/24/97 AAHESGIT #151]
Document Transfer and Conversion Tool. Check out <http://www.unc.edu/courses/ssp/convert.html>, a new tool from the U. of Virginia. It allows you to use Netscape to send files to another user, converting the format in the process. For example, using this tool, your students can send you a paper in WordPerfect 4.1, and you can receive it in Word 6.0 or in html. This tool also is useful for collaborative writing projects among people with "incompatible" software, or for simple conversions of documents to html for web publication.
Planning to be away from your e-mail for a few weeks this summer? You may want to arrange to have an automatic reply sent to anyone who sends you mail. The precise program to use depends on what system you use for your inbox (i.e. the host part of your e-mail address). In general, it's much easier to set up such an automatic reply on darkwing than on most other systems, but almost all systems, including LAN-based systems such as Pegasus/Chiron and cc:Mail, do have some way to do it.
Beware! If you receive lots of mail each week, you could easily exceed your disk quota while on vacation; if you do, any e-mail to you will be returned to sender. Use the VMS "show quota" or the Unix "quota -v" command to see what your disk usage and quota is. If you're planning to be away for an extended period, it's a very good idea to unsubscribe to any active listservs or mailing lists you're on.
If you get your mail on darkwing.uoregon.edu, you can easily set up an automatic reply by running the "vacation" program. Just log in and give the following commands:
darkwing% setenv EDITOR pico darkwing% vacation
The program will ask you a short series of questions and will run the pico editor to create a template for automatic reply messages.
When you come back from vacation you can turn off the automatic reply by running the vacation program again.
"vacation" is a smart program. It tries not to send automatic replies to mailing lists, and sends no more than one reply a week to the same sender. For more information, see <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/cgi-bin/man2html.pl?vacation>
If you want more processing power than vacation offers -- perhaps you want to send an automatic reply to your students but want to forward e-mail from your department head to your RA -- you can use procmail to process your incoming mail. Procmail is much more complex to set up than vacation, particularly when you try to send automatic replies (e.g., it would be a bad thing to send an automatic reply to a large mailing list every time you received e-mail from it). For help setting up procmail, see <http://cc.uoregon.edu/usingprocmail.html>
A program similar to procmail, called "deliver," is available as part of the PMDF mail system. It's hard to use effectively, and online documentation is cryptic. For help using it, contact the Computing Center VMS consultants. Or for more information, log in to oregon and give the command "help pmdf deliver", or see <http://oregon.uoregon.edu:7633/doc/user_vms/book_3.html#chapter_deliver>.
If you're an oregon user, it might be easier for you to just get an account on darkwing as well, forward your e-mail from oregon to darkwing, and run vacation there!
This is a selected and somewhat idiosyncratic list of upcoming
conferences relevant to educational tech., both "virtual" (online)
and traditional. For conferences that require physical travel, my
emphasis is on conferences in the Northwest and on those I find
personally interesting. The Educom and CAUSE calendars,
<http://educom.edu/web/calendar/calendarHome.html>
and
<http://cause-www.colorado.edu/information-resources/events.html>,
contain a more extensive list of mainstream conferences. Virtual
conferences and tutorials:![[new!]](newyahoo1.gif){kind=small}
![[new!]](newyahoo.gif){kind=small}
Traditional conferences and workshops:
Along the same lines as the theory that a bunch of chimps locked in a room with a bunch of typewriters could eventually come up with Shakespearean prose, a finance professor at MIT warns: "Given enough time, enough attempts, and enough imagination, almost any pattern can be teased out of any data set." Wrong-headed correlations among financial indicators are common, says the managing director of First Quadrant Corp., who illustrates his point with "Stupid Data-Miner Tricks": for instance, after sifting through a United Nations CD-ROM, he's discovered that the single best predictor of the Standard & Poor 500-stock index was butter production in Bangladesh. The problem will only get worse, say industry observers, who point out that more powerful desktop machines will be capable of making even more bizarre statistical predictions. [Business Week 16 Jun 97; quoted from Edupage, 15 June 1997]
The UO Faculty Consultants Network Newsletter is published (approximately) twice 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/>.