Letter to Participants (Sept 30)
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THIS MESSAGE IS ALSO AVAILABLE IN THE
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PPS-HYPERTREE IF YOU PREFER TO READ IT
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THERE RATHER THAN IN YOUR MAIL
http://seqnet.dl.ac.uk:8000/vsns-pps/consult/sept30.html 

State of Play at Sept 30
========================

Since I wrote to you inviting you to become a consultant a
lot has happened. Firstly, almost everyone has replied, and
everyone who did said 'yes'. There is a lot of excitement
and enthusiasm about the idea, and Marcus and I arranged
for coverage of the GNA and VSNS to be featured in the
Times Higher Education Supplement of Sept 16. From the
interest that this has generated it's clear to us that virtual
education is going to be very important, and this will be
the first course to use many novel and powerful
techniques: 

 o Distributed teaching (many different servers and
   hyperdocuments). 
 o Graphical interaction with the material. 
 o Specialised viewers and scripts to drive them (
   Kinemage, (RasMol) 
 o A MOO with graphical and other objects 
 o Methods for communal creation od documents. 
 o A set of extensible self-assessments 
 o A fluid and interative approach to course
   construction 
 o Several new ideas for student participation. 

Requested Action
================

Please look at all the material in the course and try it out.
It took Marcus about an hour. Please don't assume that
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any of it is final - it's just a starting point for the 
Simulated Annealing! Please try everything out - there
may be some missing hyperlinks and also some of the
technology may not work on your browsers - we need to
know! 

I shall be away next week but Alan Mills will be back. If
there are problems with the course, please copy Alan in; if
there are problems with the Daresbury server, please
contact Alan Bleasby. 

Please look very carefully at the timetable, the proposed
structure of the course, the suggested prerequisites (note:
these are very rough suggestions - I expect that many
students will come in knowing a smallish percentage, but
they must know some!), and the way that I hope we can
put the course together. Please be very open with
comments - my role is facilitator, not enforcer. 

I'd like you then to provide me with as much of the
following information as you can: 

 o Are there others in your group you would like to
   be involved? 
 o Are there any other people we should invite
   specifically at this stage? (I plan to advertise for
   consultants in ca 2 wks time, but probably on an
   indivdual basis). 
 o Do you run a server? If so, please can you set up a
   URL for this course under which all information
   will go. If not, can we help by either helping you
   set one up (it's straightforward and doesn't need
   root priv.) If not, can you find somewhere to post
   your material? (I am sure that BBK, DL and
   DESY will oblige :-). 
 o Please can all consultants have a personal URL.
   This will be useful to find e-mail addresses,
   MOO hours, etc. You don't have to have a gif ..
   :-) 
 o Now we'd like to know about what you think we
   should do; what you can offer (experience of RL
   courses, existing material, suggestions for
   additional topics, new technology, etc). Don't be
   reticent about what you have to offer - for
   example hand-drawn material can be re-vitalised
   by contributing students. 
 o Do you want to have a group of real life students?
   If so, do you want them to be able to participate in
   MOO discussions? 
 o How would you like to communicate? Some
   people don't like too much mail. 
 o Do you have access to a MIME-compliant mailer
   (e.g. PINE) so that we can mail each other gifs? 
 o How would you like to prepare material? Do you
   know how to use LaTeX; if so, consider whether
   LaTeX2html might be a useful way to go. What
   do you think of preparing documents communally
   (assessment, glossary, etc). If you create a
   hypertree of resources, how would it be accessed?
   On your server? Or woudl you want to send it to
   us? If so, what about updating it? 

That's probably enough for now :-) 

Technology
==========

We need to start thinking now about which technology we
can get onto people's local machines. I've noted RasMol
(now runs on Mac - haven't yet seen it Roger :-),
Kinemage (?which platforms), tcl (for running scripts to
drive RasMol - not essential, but nice to have and
portable). Do we intend to have movies? 

For the MOO gurus :-). What recommendations about
clients? Do we know which run behind firewalls? Do they
all work with Web-MOO (I can't see why not...). I
assume we are going to have a classroom in the MOO.
Any thoughts on what it might have? Also, if we
announce this course in 2 weeks time you'll probaly get a
lot of visitors - will this work out OK? 

(For other consultants who don't have experience of
MOOs, Gustavo and Eric and others have built an 
interface which works with Mosaic but allows you to
interrogate objects in the MOO. The MOO has a rich OO
data structure which we should be able to put to use, and
also, of course, you can talk to people. Despite what you
might have heard about other MOOs, BioMOO has an
excellent atmosphere and you can find your way around
very quickly. I suspect the PPS will have quite an impact
on the MOO, especially if we start holding classes with
graphical material and access to databases. Gustavo, do
you think any present inhabitants will want to be students
or consultants on the course? - I'd be happy to treat them
as a special case. 

Registration and Admin
======================

Alan, I'd be very grateful if you hold the fort here. I have
specifically said that we are not registering yet, but there
may be some anyway. We don't want to lose their names,
and they deserve an encouraging reply. (Other consultants
- if you get enquiries, can you plase copy names to Alan
and let him know whether you have replied to the
students.) 

up to index 
      pmr for pps 
Sept 30 1994