FCN News 21 October 1998

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:

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Upcoming Events

Local and online events of particular interest to FCN members (see also IT Curriculum below):

On Campus

The fall IT Curriculum is available on line. <http://libweb.uoregon.edu/it/>. Among the workshops in the next few weeks of particular interest to FCN faculty are:

Using Mhonarc to Create a Web Archive for a Majordomo List
    Wed  Oct 21  3:00 PM - 3:50 PM  EC  Lynch
Intermediate Unix
    Thu  Oct 22 11:00 AM -11:50 AM  EC  Jaeggli
More HTML
    Mon  Oct 26  3:00 PM - 4:50 PM  RSR Johnson
Statistics on the Internet
    Wed  Oct 28  3:00 PM - 4:20 PM  EC  Stave
Scanning: Digitized Images for Web Publishing
    Thu  Oct 29 10:00 AM -11:20 AM  ITC Hall
Power Web Searching
    Thu  Oct 29  1:00 PM - 2:20 PM  EC  Jenkins
Designing for the Web
    Mon  Nov 2   3:00 PM - 4:50 PM  RSR Bell
Database Concepts: Search Like A Pro! 
    Thu  Nov 5   3:00 PM - 4:20 PM  EC  Frantz
Images on Web Pages
    Mon  Nov 9   3:00 PM - 4:50 PM  RSR Holman
Cascading Style Sheets
    Tue  Nov 10  1:00 PM - 2:20 PM  RSR Johnson,Bell
Power Web Searching
    Thu  Nov 11  2:00 PM - 3:20 PM  EC  Jenkins
Forms & CGI Scripts
    Fri  Nov 13  1:00 PM - 2:20 PM  RSR Johnson

Seen on and about the Net

ALN MAGAZINE. The October, 1998 issue is on the web, and is particularly interesting because its focus is on pedagogy. <http://www.aln.org/alnweb/magazine/maga_v2_i2.htm>.

WEB USAGE STATISTICS. Edupage reports:

MERGER OF WEB MEASUREMENT FIRMS WILL SMOOTH OUT DIFFERENCES New York-based Media Metrix and Atlanta-based Relevant Knowledge, two companies that provide advertisers with statistics on how people use the World Wide Web, and that have often provided vastly different ratings from each other and from the Web sites themselves, have agreed to merge. Neither has been profitable. Rich Lefurgy, head of an industry trade group, says: "It was very hard to understand why 10 of the top 25 sites rated by Media Metrix weren't on Relevant Knowledge's Top 25 list. By bringing together the two companies we will have more credible information." (New York Times 13 Oct 98)

Ask yourself this question: is it really more credible just because nobody else is publishing inconsistent -- and equally unreliable -- information?

ESSAY GRADING SOFTWARE. Linda Perlstein writes in the Washington Post (0/13/98, p. A1, "Software's Essay Test: Should It Be Grading?"):

   Rousselin's essay was graded not by his professor, Peter Foltz, but by the computer program Foltz helped design. The technology represents one of the first major efforts in the country that employs computers to evaluate the content of a student's essay, rather than simply check its spelling, grammar or adherence to rules of style.
   ...There's no question the technology is efficient. And developers claim it is also reliable. In several studies of the Intelligent Essay Assessor, when two people and the computer graded the same essays, the computer agreed with each grader as often as the graders agreed with each other.
   But the mounting interest in the technology has been matched by concern among some educators that even if such programs can judge the quality of essays the quest for efficiency is coming at the cost of human involvement and could harm students.

THE NODE. A new web site devoted to providing a forum for faculty to talk to their colleagues about online teaching and training. <http://node.on.ca/techtrans/>.

CONGRESS TRIES AGAIN. The U.S. Congress has passed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, with provisions that update copyright law for the digital era. The legislation in general strengthens copyright protection -- extending copyright by 20 years before an item enters the public domain, and creating a new crime of tampering with a technological copyright protection measure. It also limits the liability of Internet Service Providers for copyright infringements that occur on their web sites. "While many advocates for libraries and higher education said they would have preferred a different approach to the legislation, they said they were satisfied with the 'fair use' protections in the final measure, and other compromise provisions." (Chronicle of Higher Ed, 13 Oct.).

Congress also passed the Child Online Privacy Act to prevent Internet merchants and others from giving children access to material that is "harmful to minors," a phrase that supporters of the legislation say "employs the constitutionally tested harmful-to-minors standard recognized and upheld in federal courts for more than 30 years." The legislation applies only to persons or organizations that produce the material, and does not apply to Internet service providers or other intermediaries if they do not themselves produce it. (New York Times 17 Oct 98; quoted from Edupage, 18 Oct).

How To -- long lines and majordomo

You run a class mailing list, and try to help a student who can't seem to subscribe for himself. But when you try it Majordomo replies:

** The address you supplied does not seem to be a legal Internet address.

As the error message goes on to suggest, a common reason for this problem is that many mail tools (e.g. Eudora) automatically wrap long lines in outgoing mail, but Majordomo requires that a command be all on a single line in the message. You can bypass this problem by splitting long lines yourself and putting a backslash at the ends of lines you want to be continued. For example:

To: majordomo@lists

approve paleopassword subscribe paleo345 "James Doe" \
<jdoe@gladstone.uoregon.edu>

For those of us with left-right confusion, that's "\", not forward slash, or "/".

Conferences and Workshops, Real and Virtual

The conference list now has its own web page, at <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/fcn/conferences.html>. We'll continue to use this space to highlight new conferences of particular interest to UO faculty interested in educational technology:

The Lighter Side -- more from Murphy

Murphy, as we all know, was the premier philosopher of all time. Her work has sparked numerous imitators and apocryphal sayings. Here's one that I hadn't seen before:

If you are given an open-book exam, you will forget your book."
Corollary: "If you are given a take-home test, you will forget where you live."

From Science Quotes, a collection of several hundred quips and quotes. <http://sung3.ifsi.rm.cnr.it/~dargaud/Humor/QuotesScience.html>

Administrativa

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/>.