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About the CWRL
and Student Computing at UT-Austin
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| 1. |
The Computer
Writing and Research Lab at UT-Austin
consists of four classrooms (soon to be five) in two different buildings,
a support room between each pair, a multimedia lab, and a staff lab room.
We are fortunate enough to have institutional support for full-time proctoring
during classes and for open lab hours in the afternoons and early evenings.
The proctors are primarily graduate students who teach in the labs and
proctor for six hours a week, although some of the proctors are undergraduate
work-study students.
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| 2. |
Most of the classrooms use Mac computers (two have Mac G3s, a third Mac
7600s), but one classroom runs Windows98 on PCs. This course was taught
in a Mac G3 lab, though I personally use a PC at home and have taught
in the PC lab as well. The software is mirrored to each computer and set
up on a keyserver for licensing purposes.
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| 3. |
Each student who registers at UT-Austin is automatically given
an Individually Funded (IF) account for computing which includes a free
e-mail account. Students can also sign up for inexpensive accounts for their
own web pages. Some instructors require students to have such accounts and
maintain their own web pages in order to reduce the amount of administration
the instructor has to do (like making sure all the students' links work
and uploading the files to the server). My own preference has been to use
the secondary web server we have in the CWRL labs so that the pages can
all be done locally and then uploaded "en masse" to my own site later. The
disadvantage to this is that, for security reasons, the secondary server
does not allow FTP-ing, so students can only "upload" their pages from one
of the lab classrooms. |
| 4. |
Of the many advantages to teaching in the CWRL, one is that
graduate students consistently work to create and improve tools for teaching.
For instance, a group of our graduate students developed Critical
Tools, a set of tools from which I used ready-made scripts for making
discussion
forums, an "add
link" page for creating groups of URL bibliographies, and a "contact
page" which can group e-mail addresses for inter- and intra-group e-mailing.
Another graduate student, Michael Chorost, developed The
Collaboration Center, which uses Cold FusionŠ to access database
information and a host of tools to facilitate online work in a classroom.
I have used The Collaboration Center in the past, but didn't use
it for this course. And, of course, the WORP project was developed here
as well (see Kairos,
V3.2) |
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