Before going into this tutorial, you should make sure that you are comfortable with making your way around COW. It helps if you are already a member of a conference or two, and if you've had some practice reading conferences, and topics, and participating in conversations. You should know how to create a profile for yourself, how to look up old messages, and how to do general COW business. In addition, you should have access to a computer (whether PC, Mac, or UNIX doesn't matter) and a simple text editor or any sort of HTML editor (Netscape Gold's editor, for example). Last, if you intend on having any graphics on your conference, you should have an FTP program (like WS_FTP or Rapid Filer) and some server space on an internet-linked computer. If you are a U of M professor with a valid user ID, then you probably have a regular IFS account. This works fine.

This portion of the tutorial will teach you how to set up your own conference on COW. Once again, the material is divided into chapters below. You should begin by reading through the first two chapters. There, you will learn how to have a conference initiated, with you as the fair witness, and what information you should prepare to put on the conference pages. After you receive word from the proper authorities that your conference is ready to go, you should come back here and go through the rest of the tutorial to set up your conference. The easiest thing to do, at that point, would be to follow along the tutorialand make your conference simultaneously, in another window. If you would like to automatically open a new window pointed to the COW home page, click here

Once again, you may also use this tutorial as a look-up guide, if you ever need to make changes to your conference in the future. We also recommend making a copy of the cheat sheet page, which gives quick instructions on how to do key things like changing the topic message and freezing conversations. As a final note, remember that there is a very simple HTML helper in the participant tutorial. You may find it useful as you create your conference and topic pages..

The Menu

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Setting Up

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Preparing Material

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The Conference Manager

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The Topic Manager

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Trouble Shooting

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The Cheatsheet

If you still have questions about setting up your conference, please join the Workshop conference in COW.