FCN
News 21 Jan 1998FCN
News 21 Jan 1998Don't read this by e-mail! Instead, read the hypertext version of this newsletter: <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/fcn/news/current.html>. Contents:
Local and online events of particular interest to FCN members (see also upcoming conferences and IT Curiculum below):
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Darkwing computer problems. Following the software upgrade in December, darkwing continues to experience occasional "hangs" where the system is unresponsive and appears dead for 5 minutes to more than an hour. The Computing Center is working with Sun Microsystems to fix the problem. Meanwhile, expect intermittent problems in communicating with darkwing users, and occasional delays in majordomo-based mailing lists. Note that gladstone has not been subject to most of the problems (though it was down much of today), so student access to computing has not been as seriously affected. The Computing Center reports that faculty interested in obtaining status information about their timesharing systems should subscribe to the "sys-status" mailing list. <mailto:mailserv@oregon> with text "subscribe sys-status".
IT Curriculum. The winter IT Curriculum is available at <http://libweb.uoregon.edu/it/>. Call your students' attention to the introductory classes offered. For FCN members, some of the more interesting workshops in the next 3 weeks include:
Williams Fund for Teaching Innovation. Deadline for preliminary proposals for 1998 is 2 Feb 1998. Proposals should address teaching initiatives to enhance undergraduate education at the University of Oregon. For more information, contact Dave Hubin, <mailto:hubin@oregon>.
OSSHE is no more. The Oregon State System of Higher Education, the umbrella organization under which UO flourishes or chafes, has changed its name. We're now part of the "Oregon University System" (OUS, pronounced "ooze"). For details, see <http://www.ous.edu/logo.htm>.
Internet legal information. The Internet Society provides an in-depth compendium of information about Internet law, including research, legislation, litigation, and treaty news and updates. Links include legal journals and newsletters; lists of Internet- related litigation; and even resources for locating an attorney or law firm specializing in Internet, communications, high technology, or intellectual property issues. http://www.isoc.org/internet/law.
Educational Computing Tools from Purdue University. Check out Test Pilot, a fast and easy to use tool for the development and deployment >>of online tests and surveys developed by the Purdue BioMedia Development Center. <http://biomedia.bio.purdue.edu/TestPilot/>, and the Perfect Match, a tool for building Java-based visual exercises using drag and drop <http://biomedia.bio.purdue.edu/PerfectMatch/>.
New and recommended in hardcopy: Using Eudora, 2nd Ed., by Dee-Ann LeBlanc. Indianapolis: MacMillan Computer Publishing, 1997. If you're a Eudora user, or a prospective Eudora user, and want to take more advantage of this powerful program, here's the book for you.
Viacom to sell Simon & Schuster Educational Publishing. Viacom Inc. announced 1/14/98 that it plans to sell its educational publishing operation, the world's largest educational and computer book publishers with annual sales of more than $2 billion. See <http://www.viacom.com>.
TopClass Demo. TopClass is one of the premier integrated tools for building a course on the web, and is being used both by academic institutions and by textbook publishers as a means for delivering online courses. McGraw-Hill has an interesting demo of its "Learning Architecture" available for viewing at <http://www.mhla.net/demo/demo.html>. The architecture uses TopClass from WBT Systems. For information on TopClass, see <http://www.wbtsystems.com/>.
Directory of Electronic Journals. The Association of Research Libraries has published the most recent edition of the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists (1997).The Directory includes over 7,000 listings of journals, newsletters, zines, and professional e-conferences accessible via the Internet and has become the standard reference work for these resources. It is now fully searchable on the web at < http://www.arl.org/scomm/edir/>
Suppose you have a web site on darkwing, and have decided to move it to a different location (perhaps a different subdirectory in your public_html, or perhaps to a different server). If you just move the files, anyone who has links to your old URLs will get a "404 file not found" error when trying to access your old pages. Instead of just moving your site, it's a good idea to include some information to help visitors find the new location.
For a small site, perhaps a single web page, the easiest thing to do is to replace the old page with a short temporary page that says "this page has moved. Please see ..." and includes a hyperlink to the new URL; you can delete the temporary page after a couple of months. If you have many pages, though, you might want to give people a single message no matter what page of your site they try to visit. To do this, you can create a .htaccess file in the directory for the site. In that file, include a line such as:
ErrorDocument 404 /~yourid/notfound.html
Whenever anyone attempts to load a page from your directory but the web server can't find it, it will return an error and the file notfound.html (from your public_html directory) instead of just producing a general-purpose error message. The custom message would typically tell users about the site reorganization, the location of the new URL (as a clickable link), and the e-mail address of the information maintainer
Alternatively, you can set up the web server so that all requests for files in your directory are silently redirected someplace else. You might use this, for instance, if you had moved a directory but kept the same internal directory structure, and didn't mind if people continued to use the old address as well as the new one. Suppose, for instance, that you used to keep all files for your course, paleo 235, in a subdirectory named public_html/paleo235, but now want to move that directory in public_html/courses/paleo235. In this case, you can use a .htaccess file that instead contains (all on 1 line):
Redirect /~yourid/paleo235 http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~yourid/courses/paleo235
An 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:
Traditional conferences and workshops:
Several professors were asked to solve the following problem: "Prove that all odd integers are prime."
Mathematician: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 9 is not a prime--claim is false.
Physicist: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 9 is an experimental error, 11 is a prime ...
Engineer: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 9 is a prime, 11 is a prime...
Computer: 3's a prime, 5's a prime, 7's a prime ... segmentation fault
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/>.