Welcome, EdPsy 387 students!

Who am I?

Jim Levin

Department of Educational Psychology

College of Education

My background

Who are you?

• Post in the WebBoard “Welcome” conference– Your name– Where you work and what you do– Your goals for this class

Introduction

• Course web site: http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/courses/edpsy387/sp02/

Plan for EdPsy 387

• Project-oriented

• Strong links to your own interests

• Highly interactive

Project-oriented course

• Mini projects

• Major project

Office hours

• Monday, 10am-11am, 230C Ed Bldg

• Electronic office hours: j-levin@uiuc.edu

Educational uses of the web:“From surfing to serving”

• Initially people see the Internet as a vast source of information

• The web as a distributed hypermedia

Hypertext & Hypermedia

• Our class web page as a hypertext• What is hypertext?• Text that can be read in multiple ways• Print hypertexts?• Hypermedia:

hypertext+graphics+sound+video+animation+etc.= hypertextual multimedia

The World-Wide Web

• A distributed hypermedia

• Different parts can be on different computers all around the world, with hypertextual links via the Internet

Web surfing

• Web “surfing”– Advantages– Disadvantages

Surfing to Serving

• Web Serving:– Advantages– Disadvantages

Education and the web

• The Global Schoolnet web site– Harnessing the Power of the Web

Search Engines

• Databases of web resources• Two kinds

– Directories (human classified) - Ex: Yahoo

– Web crawler-based (not human classified) - Ex: Google

• Which to use?– Use whichever ones you find useful

– When you don’t find one useful, switch to another

Understanding URLs

• A unique address for each web resource• Structure: what + which computer + which

file• Example:

http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/courses/edpsy387/sp02/index.html

• What kind of resource: http:// -> Web file• Which computer: www.ed.uiuc.edu• Which file: courses/edpsy387/sp02/index.html

Understanding Computer Names

• Domain names: used both for computer names in URLs and in email addresses (whatever is to the right of the @ sign)

• Like a postal address, but with “.” instead of new line as separator

• Most general to most specific, right to left

Example:www.ed.uiuc.edu • From the right: edu -> US higher education

institution– com --> US commercial institution– gov --> US federal government– org --> US non-profit– us --> US– mx -> Mexico– au -> Australia– Country code list: http://www.nsrc

.org/codes/country-codes.html

Example:www.ed.uiuc.edu

• Next to the left: uiuc– University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Email example: l-gomez@nwu.edu– Northwestern University

Example: www.ed.uiuc.edu

• computers in the Education Building at UIUC

• www.beckman.uiuc.edu is a computer at the Beckman Institute

Example: www.ed.uiuc.edu

• www --> a particular computer in Room 10 of the Education Building

Sending/saving URLs

• Have to get the URL exactly right (sometimes case mAtTeRs; no spaces)

• Copy & paste is best

• Emailing a URL from your web browser– Advantages: can do anywhere– Disadvantages: need to set & then unset email

preferences

• Emailing yourself

Using URLs to evaluate web sites

• Largest level domain: .edu vs. .com vs. …

• Subdomain elements: .ed.uiuc vs. .cs.uiuc

• Directory elements: /students/joe/ vs. /facstaff/chip/

• Institutional vs. personal pages: /deans/ vs. /~jlevin/

For next week

• Post in the “Welcome” conference• Skim through the Global Schoolnet website• Search for an exemplary educational website, post

in that conference the name, URL, and why you think it is exemplary

• Search for an exemplary personal web site (autobiographical: about a person by that person)

• Read Nan Goggin’s web design guide & skim the Yale Style Guide

During the lab

• WebBoard

• C-Base

• Digital photo

Digital Photo

• To be used (if you choose to do so) on your eportfolio web page or as your “signature” in WebBoard

WebBoard

• A commercial web-based conferencing system

• Log in:

• Username: your net-id

• Password: your net-id (change it)

C-Base

• A web-based computer-supported evaluation system

• Username: your net-id

• Password: your net-id (change it)

Viruses & anti-virus software

• Computer viruses are little programs that replicate by attaching themselves to other programs

• Some viruses are “benign” (they don’t do much besides replicate); others do harm (deleting files, changing files, etc.)

Anti-virus software

• Virex for the Macintosh

• Virus Scan for Windows 95/98

• Commercial, but licensed to you as students of UIUC and on your CD-ROM

• Need to obtain the update files at least monthly from the UIUC software site

Virus hoax messages

• Any message that says “send this on to everyone you know” is probably a virus hoax message

• Before you do, check a reputable source - for example, http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html

“Macro” viruses

• Some applications allow for “macros” to automatically do repeated actions (for example, the Microsoft Office suite - MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, MS Outlook)

• This “macro” mechanism can be used to create “macro viruses” which spread through documents (Word files, Outlook email, Excel spreadsheets)

To avoid “macro viruses”

• Turn off the automatic running of macros

• Beware of files that ask to run macros when opened (“just say no”)

• Update your Windows MS Office applications

Backup

• Backup means making copies of important files so they’re available in case you lose the original files

• The more important a file is, the more frequently it should be backed up and the more different places it should be copied to

Backup

• Manual: copying individual files to floppy disks, zip disks, other hard disks, file servers, etc.

• Automatic: using an application that keeps track of what’s changed and therefore what needs to be copied at specified times

However

• Archival backup: keeping copies of older versions of your files that you keep around (forever? a year? …)

• If you make a change and only later discover that you’ve lost something, you can go back to an archival copy

• Periodic housekeeping: copy to floppy or zip disk; delete from local hard disk if not in current use