Notes for Lab Assistants

Lab TA's for the course should carefully read the following:

Local TA notes
A brief note on formatting...
Setup Notes for Individual Labs

Developers and head TA's should do the following:

Read everything in this document
Read the TA notes for each individual lab
Read everything in the local directory, and change them all to fit the current situation.

Overall Hardware Requirements

Windows boxes: Pentium, 16 MB, Windows95
Mac boxes: PowerPC, 16 MB, System 7.5.1
Solid-state camera (e.g. Apple QuickTake). The actual taking of pictures is not an essential part of the course, and scanning in normal photographs could be subsituted.
Computer speakers (if not built-in) or headphones for each computer being used simultaneously.
File Server for Mac and PC LAN
UNIX web Server (Telnet and HTTP server)

Overall Software Requirements

Standard Macintosh 7.5 Guide and Windows95 interactive help and tutorials
Netscape Navigator version 3.0 or higher (freeware)
NCSA Telnet (Mac) (freeware)
WinQVT (Windows) (freeware)
Stuffit Expander (Mac) (freeware)
Winzip (Windows) (shareware)
World Wide Web Weaver 1.1.1(Mac) (shareware)
HTML Writer (Windows) (freeware)
Adobe Photoshop (Mac) (commercial)
Paint Shop Pro (Windows) (shareware)
SoundEffects 0.9.2 (Mac) (shareware, $15 registration fee) GoldWave 3.0.3(Windows) (shareware, $30 registration fee)
Sun JDK (both platforms) (labs tested using v1.0.2)
WebMap (Mac) (shareware)
Mapedit(Windows)
Morph (commercial)

This software should all be installed on the LAN fileserver, except for things such as Photoshop and which are already installed on a different server or on each machine's hard disk. Make sure that all needed software is available before each lab; as much as possible, also try to ensure that as much of the software as possible is installed on the hard drives, as opposed to only the file server. The programs needed for each week are mentioned in each week's TA notes.

Generic Web Setup

This section explains how to build an online course from the master resources. (In this case, the course has already been built, but this should help may make it clearer how the pieces fit together.)

First, create a course home directory on the Web server and give it subdirectories modules, local, and board (optionally, also people). In addition, from the master location, link in the glossary and icons subdirectories, and copy the .html and .cgi files.

In the modules directory, link all the modules required by the course, from the master modules directory (note that some modules depend on others). In the local directory, make copies of the files in the master local directory and adapt them to the local computer setup. In the board directory, place the necessary files to manage a participant bulletin board system (such as HyperNews). In the people directory, place pointers to people's home pages (or manage the home pages directly).

Adapt the index.html and notes.html files to the course curriculum, and adjust the configuration of the Perl script navigate.cgi to allow students to step through the curriculum in the proper order for the course.

A brief note on formatting...

The individual lab modules are presented on-line in their entirety, and it is intended that the on-line versions will be actively used during the lab sessions themselves. This allows a great deal of flexibility through the use of hypertext links, especially with respect to glossary definitions*. However, there are clearly cases where it will be advantageous to print out some of the lab material. In cases where users are reading a printed page, however, they are less likely to access all the information available through the hyperlinks. For this reason, from time to time you will see a paperclip icon in a lab module, next to a hyperlink:

This indicates a link to a document which the author considered important enough that it might be printed out along with the main instructions, so that it is sure to be handy during the lab. These are intended as general guidance only, and all essential links are not necessarily marked with a paperclip.

Setup Notes for Individual Labs

$Date: 1996/06/22 21:16:16 $