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
During the course, we will make extensive use of a news group that is located on news.ilt.columbia.edu. The name of the group is tu5020-cmc. Here are directions for subscribing, using the Netscape Communicator 4.0. I'm sorry these if these are hard going.
In your browser, in the Edit menu,
open Preferences. . .
To read news groups with Internet Explorer 4.0, you need to have loaded Outlook Express (I am not a fan of Internet Explorer and the way it tries to capture one for various commercial services).
In Internet Explorer, open the Tools
menu, click on Accounts.
(Mac instructions will soon be added in.)
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 web page introducing yourself and transfer it to the course web site at
http://projects.ilt.columbia.edu/tcclasses/tu5020b/
Each of you has a subdirectory
/julie
/carol
/jen
/donna
/robbie
/allison
/larisa
/nicol
/kevin_t
/kathy
/gene
/kevin_w
Permissions are set so the locations are visible to the world. You can access the site using FTP, identifying yourself with the User Name and password that I have sent to you separately. This gives you full privileges (read, write, add, delete, etc.) for the /tu5020b directory and all the subdirectories. Please exercise those privileges only with respect to your own subdirectory.
If you have not used an FTP program, it may be difficult at first. Essentially you need to enter the Internet address of the server -- projects.ilt.columbia.edu. For user name, enter enter the user name, and for password enter password. This will connect you to the /tu5020b directory. To reach you subdirectory, you will need to Change Directory to the correct subdirectory listed above. Your FTP program will then permit you to perform standard file transfer functions, uploading and downloading, changing the names of files, deleting them, etc. (Please Remember: To get the files you transfer into your subdirectory, you will need to ChgDir down to that subdirectory before actually transferring the files.)
It is a standard convention in HTML for the top page in a directory to have the name index.html. I am setting up the Class Participant page with pointers after each of your names with the following URL -- http://projects.ilt.columbia.edu/tcclasses/tu5020b/[yourname]/index.html. If you name the top level HTML page you create and transfer to your directory index.html and have it control access to other files you put up there, you can completely manage materials in your directory without any further change of the main course files (unless of course that is needed for some special purpose that occurs to you as our work proceeds).
After joining the News Group, the next step is to start FTPing an index file into your subdirectory. Soon the mechanics will be established and we can concentrate on matters of substance. 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).
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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