Students will not be able to log onto the WebBoard until they have send me an email so that I can establish their identity with the WebBoard and invitation to join the WebBoard can be sent out by the WebBoard.

Grades

The WebBoard is the heart of this course.  Plan to spend about 3 to 4 hours of class time per week reading and posting on the

WYSIWYG interface, . better, but works only under IE, not Firefox

• http://webboard.ucc.edu/WB/?boardID=cis120300084   for the online class and
• http://webboard.ucc.edu/WB/?boardID=cis120001084  MWF F2F class

and Native interface

• http://webboard.ucc.edu:8080/~cis120300084 for the online class and
• http://webboard.ucc.edu:8080/~cis120001084  for the MWF F2F class

 for "native" - older interface (switch to WYSIWYG interface by gong to More and List Board and Select Fall 2007)

Students will post their answers to all assignments on the WebBoard. Here students read and comment (suggest improvements to) the work of fellow students. It is class discussion and your Posts and Replies are an integral part of your grade.

This is a long page. It is important that you read it all carefully. It explains:

• How to Customize your profile
• How to Write a Post and a Reply and the difference
• How to create link to other web pages
• Some HTML that you should use to increase the readability of your posts

Username and password

Your username is:

•  the first letter of your first name

 plus

• the first letter of your last name

plus

• your CWID

Your initial password is simply the first letter of first name plus the first letter of your last name, both lower case  (A student named John Doe would have a login id of John and a initial password of jd). Thus it is imperative you change it immediately, per below.

Page Table of Contents

Grades

Username and password

Student Feedback

WebBoard modes

How to Master WebBoard

Customize your profile
& add a photo

How to Write a Post/Reply

Link to other web pages

Use HTML to emphasize text

Add Pictures in your posts

Signature

Student Feedback

Most students find it difficult to give feedback on the work of fellow students.  It is thought of as criticizing the work of other students. It is NOT. Student critiques and professor comments on the WebBoard are not assessments nor evaluations nor grading the work of students.  They are analysis of the work done and ideas on how to improve the product.  Consider the work world for which college courses are preparing students.  If an employee or a team designs a product, it is always presented  to fellow employees to analyze, critique and offer suggestions before being delivered to customers.  The manager (and company owner) expects the reviewing employees to make as many suggestions for improvement as they can BEFORE the product is offered to customers.   If the reviewers say "Oh that is so nice" or "I really enjoyed seeing your product", needed improvements will not be made and the final product will be substandard and the competition, where strenuous review procedures are followed, will eventually put the company out of business and the oh so polite employees out of a job. 

WebCT does provide a Discussion board (a.k.a. Message Board, a.k.a. discussion or Forum), but is vastly superior since the author of a post, and/or the moderator of the board (me), can edit or even delete posts. If you post something in the incorrect conference, I can move the post and its replies, so the board will stay organized.

The first assignment is to Introduce yourself and then comment on the introductions of your fellow classmates.

Customize your profile

Immediately after signing on for the first time, select More and My Profile to customize your profile:

• change your password. Here are some rules for good passwords
  • be sure to make it something you will remember. You must remember your user name and password. No one can provide it you. In most cases the administer can reset it to something that you must again modify.
  • use a combination of letters, upper and lower case and numbers and special characters (the top row of the keyboard)
  • don't make it something associated with you like your kids name or your birthday.
  • don't make it a word that is in the dictionary like college
  • have two (or more passwords). One for school and less important stuff, and who really cares if it is discovered, and one for money matters.
  • see some good sites about creating good passwords
    • http://www.alw.nih.gov/Security/Docs/passwd.html
    • http://www.cs.umd.edu/faq/Passwords.shtml
    • http://www.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/doc/passwords/passwords.html
    • http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1537
• correct the spelling of your First and/or Last name (if needed)
• put in your home or work city and state (2 characters for state NJ for New Jersey)
• add a signature (similar to an email signature)
• add a photo by
  • Click Options
  • Click My Profile
  • On the Bottom is Image
  • Click Add, remove, change Image
  • Browse to a photo on your PC and either click Open or double click the photo which takes you back to the "Upload an Image to your user profile" screen
  • Click the Submit button on the lower right hand
    Note Images may be a maximum of 120 pixels wide, 120 pixels high, and no larger than 40.0 KBytes.
    That's pretty small (low res)
• select Yes for "Automatically mark new msgs read: When I log off mark all messages as read"
  Which implies you will read ALL new messages before logging off"
  Use WebBoard Help and other online tutorials

How to Master WebBoard

Instructions are available online from WebBoard and from UCC and also from WebBoard's Help (the rightmost item on the top of the WebBoard Screen). Before you use the board, familiarize yourself with its operation.
There are several online tutorials on my UCC faculty site too. Time spent learning a software product will save you much more time in frustrating attempts to accomplish what your want.

If you see the following menu on top of the screen when you log in switch to the new Webboard mode

switch to the new Webboard mode which looks like this

Open the posts one by one in a new window (right click).

The discussion host (me) selects the conferences. The board will start with:

• Read This NOW
• Contribute to the Web
• Lunch/Dinner RSVP
• General Discussion
• Questions about the course
• Introduce Yourself
• In the News!
• Paper Plan: Topic & Sources
• One Conference per assignment
• Students Helping Students
• Student Lounge

As new subject matter is discussed, I may add new conferences. Only the owner of the forum (that's me, your Prof.) can add new conferences. So if you think we should add one, either send me email or post a new message in the General Discussion topic.

How to Write a Post/Reply

Everyone is required to read every message posted. So following a few rules will make the board efficient and pleasant to use:

• use an email reply when your message is ONLY for the person whose post you are replying to
• post things in the correct conference
• use a Post for a new thought and a Reply when commenting on or adding to some else's thought
• if and when a Post is no longer relevant, please Delete it.
• edit your post if you want to add or change (add to pr revise) something (usually you should have only one post per conference)

Only make posts that are course relevant and move the conversation and learning forward. The entire class is required to read every message that is post so don't waste every one's time.

Student Lounge conference has been provided for "chit-chat". Everyone has to read all new stuff and chit-chat slows us all down. Send email or chat for one-to-one discussions. Your grade is determined by the the quantity and quality of good posts.

When you access the board (several times a week) read the new messages. Use Search to find messages after a specific date.

If you wish to respond to a message select REPLY at the bottom. You can also email the message to anyone (a forum member or anyone whose email address you know).
When you write the post/reply, you can EDIT or DELETE it.

Type your response into a word processor

If your are as poor a speller/typist, as I am, you might type your message in to a word processor so you can

• a spelling checker
• thesaurus
• word count
• back up (you're online with the WebBoard and could loose your connection and your work)

Then copy it onto the clipboard and paste it into your Board message.

I save all my word processed messages that I have copied to the Board in one big file so I an reuse a response with minor edits and because sometimes the messages seem to disappear for no reason.

Use Post for a new topic

It is very important to make the correct choice of Post versus reply !
If what you have to say is NEW, then choose Post under the correct conference. Take care to create a Topic (subject) of the post/reply meaningful. For reply the topic of the original post is supplied but you should change it. You could include your name as the part of the subject of the post. A new post is called a "thread", mean a new train of thought. Use reply when you are talking about the same thing and do a new post when it is different. Of course, there are times when that isn't a clear call. When the wrong Post versus Reply choice is made, the Message Board becomes like a file cabinet with everything misfiled!

Topic subject:

When ever you post, your subject is critical because that is all that shows in the left window. Really describe what you're going to talk about and possibly identify yourself (include your first name.) . Each Topic (like the subject of an email) whether for a post or a reply should summarize the contents of the message and intrigue the reader to read the message – let’s see what fun and interesting topics you can post! Good topics will improve our grade, bad topic sill reduce it.

Grades

Your grade for Assignments and Feedback (see syllabus will be based both on content and your proper use of WebBoard features

• Use of Proper Post/Reply and conference selection
• Good Subjects
• Attachments (use only when needed)
• Hyperlinks (for text and graphs)
• Add effect Bold, italics, color, font size - easy with eh WYSIWYG version, or using HTML (B for Bold, I for Italics, font size and color)
• Images (<img src="http://blah-blah.jpg">

Attachments

The beauty of forums is that you can add both attachments and hyperlinks to your messages. Use attachment ONLY when the document is supposed to be printed or viewed with special software like PowerPoint or Excel. For almost all posts in this course (except for your Research Paper draft and Final), use the message portion of the post, NOT an attachment..

To attach a Microsoft Word document (preferable saved as an RTF, but essential if composed using Microsoft Works, be sure to save ) or a picture or a sound or... Click on Attach and browse around and highlight the name of a file you wish to attach or type its name in.

WebBoard modes

WebBoard has 2 different interfaces.  The old or "native" mode and the newer, easier to use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) mode, screen pictured below and to the right  I was able to switch to the new mode by selecting My Board and then "The Internet CIS 120 300 Fall 2008".  The newer mode has a much WYSIWYG  Post interface. Note on the bottom of the Options screen you can select a different color screen (style sheet).

When writing Posts and replies it is much, much easier to use the WYSIWYG interface

• Bold
• Italics
• Underline (don’t use this online cause hyperlinks are underlined
• Left align
• Center
• Right align
• Justified on both margin
• Bullets
• Numbers
• Indent
• Reduce indent
• Hyperlink
• Marquee (get attention getter)
• Break (go to next line without skipping a line)
• Font size drop down

Next line

• Cut

• Copy
• Paste
• Select All
• Clear markup
• Clear Form (erase your message?)
• Undo
• Redo
• Font Color ((use it to make your message more lovely/interesting to read)
• Font Style

To include a graphic image, just paste it!

Since it is so easy make your posts and replies interesting wit marquees, images, color and most importantly hyperlinks

Below are instructions for the older a.k.a. Native interface

Link to other web pages To put a hyperlink to a URL either (easiest) Type the WHOLE THING like http://www.ucc.edu.  The easiest way to do this is to copy it from the Address bar of the browser.  Remember the http:// If you want to have words be the hyperlink rather than the http://address then type <a href=" the URL (which should be copied and pasted) type a space(spacebar) target="_blank" if you want it to open in a new window of its own "> type the words to be underlined as a hyperlink type </a> If you want to have an image be the hyperlink rather than the http://address then type <a href=" the URL (which should be copied and pasted) type a space(spacebar) target="_blank" if you want it to open in a new window of its own "> type <img src=" Paste the URL of the image (get this by right clicking on the image in a browser, selecting Properties from the short menu, highlighting the address and copying it to the clipboard) type"> type </a> Use HTML to emphasize text To bold something put <b> before it and </b> after it. (<B> and </B> is equally good.) To italicize something put <i> before it and </i> after it.(<I> and </I> is equally good.) Bold and italics would look like this <b> <i> something</i> </b> Change color with <font color=red> words that you want to be red </font> (other colors areblue, brown, green, ....) Make the text big with <font size=+2> words that you want to be BIG</font>< To make things more readable Skip to a new line with <br> Skip a line and start a new paragraph with <P> or <p> Add Pictures in your posts and Signature Include Pictures (graphics), which make your post so much more interesting to read. For example, the HTML <img src="http://faculty.ucc.edu/business-greenbaum/images/faces.gif"> points to a graphic. It must be entered EXACTLY as above: < (less than) before everything > (greater than) at the very end img src with a space in-between img and src (that is the only space between the < and the >.) two double quotes " before the http before the > The best way to get the web address of a graphic is: to right click on it select Properties highlight and copy the ENTIRE address from http to gif (or jpg) then paste it between the two "s. Step by step go to window with the web page that has the graphic you wish to use right click on the graphics (be sure that you have permission to use that graphic) select Properties from the short menu highlight the URL (everything from http:// to gif or jpg) point at the highlighted letters right click select copy from the short menu go to the window where you are creating your signature type <img src=""> Note there are two double quotes click between the two " (quotes) paste (Ctrl+V or right click Paste) this name that is on the clipboard from step 7 between the two " Signature When an image in the WebBoard signature on the profile screen, it will automatically appear with each post and reply.  This is so important in personalizing messages where the two parties communicating have either never met physically do so infrequently.