HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA
HISTORY DEPARTMENT
BARNARD COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Technical Aspects of the Seminar
1. The Use & Utility of the Seminar Homepage
[http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/learn ]
This seminar has a homepage/site published on the World Wide Web and accessible from all computers with access to the Internet. It contains a variety of materials relevant to the purposes of the seminar, including electronic versions of the provisional seminar calendar, assignments/ readings, weekly seminar notes, timelines and relevant Web-sites Updates of all these materials will be published regularly as the seminar and semester go along, so keep checking. The site operates off a server maintained by the Barnard Electronic Archive and Teaching Lab [BEATL http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu] in Lehman 201.
This web site will also eventually provide links to the course homepages/sites of all members of the seminar. It is on here where your assignments will be electronically published and made available to the world. More on this below.
2. The Use and Utility of a Seminar CUBBoard
[hist3464-001-991@columbia.edu]
For instructions for logging on to Higher Learning Seminar CUBoard:
3. The Use and Utility of Web Search Engines [Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc].
Members of the seminar will be expected to utilize electronic as well as hard-copy bibliographic resources, which means developing skills in the searching the World Wide Web. This involves being able to characterize your research needs in searchable terms, which give you fair assurance of discovering the web sites relevant to your research purposes. Several search engines are accessible from either the Barnard Library home page [http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/ ]or by clicking on "Internet" on the Coumbia University home page http://www.columbia.edu/cu/internet/
4. The Use and Utility of Your Own Seminar Home Page
[http://www,columbia.edu/~Your CUID/learn.html]
All formal seminar presentations (heretofore "papers") will be published on your own seminar home page, which makes them readable by me, the other students in the seminar and pretty much the rest of the world. This means you will need to become familiar with the format language of the Web -- HTML - and learn to take advantage of the HTML format. This will permit you to include images in your presentations, to make hyperlinks from one part of your presentation to another and/or to distant web sites. It also means that you need to take into account not only your immediate audience in the seminar and its specific purposes but your much larger potential audience and its heterogeneous needs. All such presentations will be linked to the seminar home page during the semester; especially effective ones will be made a permanent part of the Seminar's homepage. Your chance for electronic immortality….
A hands-on HTML/home page-publishing workshop is being organized by the ITS staff at Barnard for this seminar. It will likely take place in the second and/or third week of the semester. Exact dates to follow...
Enough on technical matters, for now.
For more on creating your own web page: