The uses and limitations of our technology
- The Neo mail server.
Big advantage: It enables me to send e-mail to the entire class
roster easily. Disadvantage: Mail sent by that method is
regarded as "official university business" and therefore is NOT
forwarded, even if you have arranged for your mail to be
forwarded!
I think that this totally defeats the purpose of mail forwarding,
but it's beyond my control.
Policy decisions: I will continue to put announcements on the
course Web page (the one on calclab, not WebCT), or occasionally
in the Discussion folders on WebCT.
(I assume that you will be logging into both of these frequently.
There is now a link from the WebCT page to the calclab page (and
also to Allen's text).) I'll
then send e-mail to the Neo list to inform you that the new
material is there. In really urgent cases I'll also send mail
directly to those students who have their Neo mail forwarded.
(Please let me know if you are in that category.)
- Private Mail page on WebCT.
I discourage use of this -- may even remove it from the page.
Mail sent through this system cannot be forwarded at all, so it's
just one more page to check every day.
- Personal Home Pages on WebCT.
This is another disappointment. I had hoped that this would be
the natural place to post your major papers, but it seems not
well adapted to that.
- Discussions folders on WebCT.
This will probably be our workhorse! When I last looked, 8 of
the 12 students had posted their little autobiographies.
(Where are the rest of you?)
I will learn (I hope) how to reorganize the messages into folders
and threads. Please exercise some judgment about whether to post
a message as a new one or a reply to a related old one.
- Chat Rooms and Office Hours.
You can see my regular office hours on my personal Web page, but
they will be moot for most of you because of distance or
time-of-day or both. I'll create a new Discussion topic for you
to suggest the time of the week (translate to Central Time Zone,
please)
when you are most likely to log in for a chat.
Please note that the top 4 chat rooms are logged (i.e., I can
read them after the fact) and the 4th has been named "Office
Hours" to indicate that I will try to log in there myself at some
mutually convenient time.
I have evening commitments (varying from week to week), so I may
not always be available.
Some comments on course procedures that didn't fit
elsewhere
- Tests: Let's not have any!
I prefer to give you as much time as possible to work on your
term paper while leaving myself as much time as possible to grade
them.
The main reason for a test in a course like this would be to
determine whether students are actually doing the reading and are
retaining some information. I hope that for persons of your
maturity the assignments and discussions will give me an
adequate, or better, picture of your performance.
- Links to Prof. Allen's old pages (term paper topics, etc.)
are for information only. My instructions supersede his!
Usually my instructions are less stringent -- in particular, I
don't require that all the books and term paper topics be
different.