Instructor: Robbie McClintock
| rom2@columbia.edu | Office
hours
Course Assistant: Kevin Wolff | kaw30@columbia.edu
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Starting March 9th, we will be working together to explore how computer-mediated communication is developing and how it relates to education. During an initial orientation period, starting February 26th, we should be introducing ourselves to each other and making sure we can manage the mechanics of an on-line seminar. This Introduction gives you some initial guidelines and a few tasks to complete, which should work as a preliminary tutorial to participating in the course.
To begin with, note the following on-line requirements. This seminar is not for students seeking an initial experience in using the Internet or other digital communications technologies. It presumes your ability to use such technologies. You need to do extensive surfing of the World Wide Web, use email and a course news group, and contribute HTML material to our website. The object is to use these tools to advance our understanding of the cultural and educational questions at issue in the course, not to advance our know-how with Internet technologies.
A fast Internet connection will facilitate your work -- 14.4 is the minimum, 28.8 will be OK. Since this course will take place on the Web and will use its resources extensively, a current generation browser is highly advisable -- either Netscape Communicator (version 4.04 is current) or Microsoft Internet Navigator (version 4.0 is current). You may need to use Telnet, adequate versions of which are included in Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0, as well (I believe) with Mac OS. You will definitely need an FTP program. I believe an adequate version of FTP is included in Mac OS (you will soon realize that I am a long-time Windows user whose knowledge of the Mac is fuzzy). If you are a Windows user, a good, relatively inexpensive FTP program, WS_FTP Professional, can be downloaded from Ipswitch, Inc. It is not the case that the World Wide Web is saving trees -- a printer at hand while you surf
You need to establish a Columbia University computer account, to which you are entitled as a matriculated student, as we will be using a News Group that permits access only to registered Columbia users. You can establish your account online here. Once you have a Columbia User ID, you can subscribe to the course News Group (instructions for this appear on the Resources page). As a kind of orientation treasure hunt, you will then find a message to everyone in the news group that includes a form to use to present yourself initially to the group. Please copy the form back into a message to the group, fill it out to share basic who's who information with each other, and post it back to the news group. If this presents difficulties, contact Kevin Wolff, assistant for the course, or myself, posting your explanation of the difficulty the News Group to begin with. Everyone has difficulties getting the technology to behave -- do not be afraid to post your questions about it and do not be unwilling to help someone out when you can -- everyone gains a better command of the systems that way. We should aim to make the TU5020 group a technically self-sufficient group as soon as possible by using our capacities for mutual assistance.
Recently a student at the University of Nebraska complained in a suit that a professor had infringed her copyright by posting a paper she had written on the web. The circumstances were very different than anything we will encounter. Nevertheless, be advised that what you send to the news group and post on any website associated with this course, will for practical purposes be in the public domain. Materials addressed to specific individuals through email will not be accessible to the public. Our news group is open to anyone with a Columbia user account. Websites will ordinarily be open to anyone on the Internet. For a few specialized purposes as the course unfolds, we may create restricted Intranets within the course website, but that will not be the norm. Posting is a form of publication. Part of our task will be to understand how to make it an effective form and what we should do to make it optimally serve the advancement of knowledge and education.
In addition to introducing yourself through the News Group, during the orientation period you should create an introductory personal web page in your Cunix account, following the instructions Cunix gives. These instructions are not entirely satisfactory. Kevin is developing a supplement. Basically, we advise that you follow the Cunix instructions only for the last stage of the process through which you store the files in your Cunix account and set UNIX permissions to make them viewable by the world. You will find it much easier and productive if you compose your web material on your local machine -- Mac of PC -- using a current generation word processor that writes HTML files, or a web page editor such as WebExpress or FrontPage98 (or their equivalents for the Mac). The best way to actually upload your files to your Cunix account is through FTP.
This largely covers the preliminaries. To summarize, you need to set up a Columbia mail account if you do not already have one, subscrive to our news group, post to the news group information about who you are, and create and publish a personal web page introducing yourself as a participant in the course. These activities will lead to further, on-going interaction.
Welcome,
\Robbie McClintock
last modified 25-Feb-98
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