The Conference Manager

After you receive an e-mail from the U of M COW Administrator telling you that your conference has been set up, you can go into COW and begin to set things up. You will need to go into the Change Hotlist area and add your new conference to your list, just as if you were a regular participant. Fear not, however, you will have fair witness privileges. After you are done, click the 'Save New Hotlist' button, to go back to your new Hotlist. Now you should see the name of your new conference as part of the list. Click on that name.

At this point, the conference will be pretty empty. You should see a generic message saying something along the lines of "the fair witness of this conference has not written a welcome message yet...." Let's fix that. Toward the bottom of the page, you should see a line reading:

You are the Fair Witness for this conference
[Conference Manager] is available.

Click on that link. At this point, you should see a new browser window open up with the Conference Manager loaded. This page has several buttons on the right that take you to pages that allow you to edit your conference. Below, I describe these pages. Note that after you make any changes in any of these pages, you will be automatically returned to a Conference Manager page.

• Change Conference Config
• User Access List
• Edit Welcome Message
• Edit Conference Comment
• Create New Topic
• Arrange Topics
• Back to Conference

Change Conference Configuration

This page allows you to define some basic information about your conference. Follow the instructions below to fill in the appropriate boxes:
• Conference Complexity: This allows you to decide how complex a conference you would like to have. Most conferences consist of topics, which in turn have conversations. If you would like your conference to be more simple than that, you can have a conference that only has conversations in it. To do that, switch to "Single Topic". Otherwise, you can leave this setting alone.
• Access: Public means that anybody that wants to subscribe to your conference can do so with no special permission. If your conference is intended for a class, you may want to click Restricted instead, which means that you dictate who can enter and who cannot, but your conference is listed as Restricted for people you do not allow into your conference. This is useful, because any students who you may have missed permitting the conference to when you started then have a way to contact you. If you would prefer to have a conference that is completely unlisted, click on the Unlisted box, and it will be unlisted for all but the people you permit to the conference.
• Allow Change Responses: By default, participants can change responses that they have entered. If you would prefer that they not be able to change their own responses, change this to No.
• Fair Witness List: You should already see your uniqname in this box, which means that COW recognizes you as a fair witness to this particular conference. Being a fair witness means that you have access to both the conference manager and the topic manager, described in the next lesson, and everything they allow you to do. If you would like to give fair witness privileges to additional people (such as GSI's for example), just add their uniqnames after yours. Make sure to separate all uniqnames by commas, and do not put any spaces between the names and the commas.
• Primary Fair Witness Name: This is simply the official name of the head fair witness to this conference. Your name should be here.
• Primary Fair Witness Email: Your e-mail should go here. If your conference is private and people outside the conference wish to join, they will probably send a request to this e-mail address.
• Available to External Users: The University of Michigan makes selected conferences available to people who are not affiliated with the University. If you would like to make your conference available to any of those people, you should change this to Yes. This is useful for allowing a professor at another school access to a class conference, or to make a more global discussion area.

IMPORTANT: Each time you are done making changes to the boxes here or in any other part of the conference manager, you must click the Change button. In this case the button is called Change Config. If you don't click this button, your changes will not take effect.

Note that there is also an Advanced Configuration link at the bottom of this screen. That screen has a host of other configuration options for your conference that you may want to investigate, including:

• Allow Mark All responses as read: which allows participants in a conference to mark the conversations in a given topic as read without actually viewing the conversations. If you have COW as a requirement in a class, you may want to change this to No.
• Allow Ignore Conversation: which allows participants to mark conversations so that they don't have to read future postings in that conversation. Again, if you have COW as a requirement in a class, you may want to change this to No.
• Allow Anonymous Responses: allows participants to make anonymous responses that their name is not attached to. In the case of an emergency, the COW administrators can find out who made a particular response, but that person's identity will otherwise be private.
• Advanced Options (Best Left Alone): This box uses programming code to allow you to, among other things, have all messages sent to your conference automatically forwarded to your e-mail address (not recommended). Unless you know a lot about COW, you should leave this box alone.
• Use icon set: allows you to choose which "emoticons" you will allow people to associate with their responses, including allowing a selection from the standard list.
• Select Icons: allows you to choose which icons your participants can use, if you selected Selected set above this list.
• Select BODY tags: allows you to select the colors that your conference will use. We suggest that you not change these unless you know a fair amount about HTML. Also note that there is not currently a way to change the button images, so changing the colors here may make the normal COW buttons look a little bit strange.

User Access List

This page allows you to change the list of people who have permission to enter your conference. The page has four boxes. The first allows you to add a person, the second allows you to remove a person, the third is a larger box showing you the current access list, and the fourth is a larger box showing the current auditor list.

To make multiple changes: If you are creating the list for the first time, you should use the quick method. Simply type the list of user ID's in the large box under 'Make Multiple Changes'. Put each name in its own line, separated by returns. You may both remove and add names, and you may make as many changes as you like. When you are done, click the 'CHANGE ACCESS LIST'.

To add a single person: type that person's login ID in the box under 'Add a Single User'. Then click the 'ADD USER' button. After a few seconds, you should see that person added to the list below.

To remove a single person: type that person's login ID in the box under 'Remove A Single User'. Then click the 'REMOVE USER' button. After a few seconds, you should see that person's name removed from the list below.

To manage auditors: You are given a list of auditors. These are people who can view the conference, but are not allowed to make responses. You manage this list the same way you manage multiple changes to the user list.

Edit Welcome Message

The Welcome Message is what participants read when they enter the conference page. Remember, you can use any sort of HTML you want within this message, as with any other larger pieces of text such as conversation messages, topic messages, etc. Also, make sure that you preview your Welcome Message before you click to change it.

To change the Welcome Message: use the same process you would use to post a message to a conversation. Type the body of the Welcome Message in the large box below 'Current welcome'. If you are uncomfortable with entering HTML, uncheck the 'Check here to have your message interpreted as HTML' button below the large box. When you are done, you should click the 'Preview welcome' button. Then, click the browser's BACK button and, if you have no additional changes to make, click the 'Change welcome'. Once again, unless you click the 'Change welcome' button, no changes will take place. Remember, you can use any sort of HTML you want within this.

Edit Comment

When participants click into the Change Hotlist page, they see a list of the names of the conferences to which they subscribe. Next to the name, if you recall, they have a checkbox they can click to add that conference to their Hotlist. If they click on the name, they go to a page that tells them the name of the fair witness, their e-mail, and a short comment on what that conference is about. This is the Conference Comment. To change the Conference Comment, use the same procedure as we used to change the Conference Welcome Message above.

Create New Topic

Each time you want to create a new topic, you start here. It's a bit confusing that in order to make a topic you go to the conference manager instead of the topic manager, but such is the way with COW. Once again, you have several boxes to fill out which I discuss below:
• New Topic Name ( Subject Line ): This is the name that will be listed at the bottom of the conference page when a participant goes to check for new messages. You should only fill this box out once. If you want to change the name of the topic, you will have to do so within the topic manager.
• Topic Number ( Decimal ): This is simply a number to keep track of the topic by. It's a good idea for you to a list, on the side, of which topic corresponds to which number. This will make your life easier when you create links in the Related Topics section (#3 below). You may use a period in numbering your topics. For example, if you want to give a separate topic to each section in a certain chapter of the class book, you can name the topics 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc.
• Related Topics ( comma separated list ): You can create a link from one topic to another. You may want to do this if the material or the discussion in them is similar. The related topics you list here will be written at the bottom of this topic page as you may have seen before. To create the links, simply write the number of the related topics, separated by commas.
• The Private Box: This is similar to the option you have of making the whole conference private, except that it applies to this particular topic alone. If you click this box, only those people you list in the Access List (see #5) box can enter this topic. If you leave this box unchecked, everybody in your conference can enter this topic.
• Access List ( If Private ): If you checked the Private Box, you should list the login names of everyone who you would like to give access to this particular topic. You list the names in the same manner as you would for the Conference Access -- write each name on a separate line.

Once again, you must click the Make Topic button for the topic to be created. If you made a mistake and would like to start over, then as long as you didn't already click the Make Topic button, you may click the Reset button and start from scratch.

After you click the Make Topic button, you will go to a page that tells you that the new topic has been created and offer you a link to the Topic Manager in order to set up that topic. At this point you should take a break from the Conference Manager portion of the tutorial and go to the Topic Manager lesson.

Arrange Topics

Once you have several topics down, you may want to visit the Arrange Topics page. This page allows you to delete or rename topics. The page is basically a long list of all the current topics. Each topic listed looks like this:

---

Current:	#	The current topic name
New:
Change Topic #? Delete #?

---

The first line -- Current -- tells you the properties of the topic now. The second line allows you to change those properties. If you want to change the name of the topic, type the new name in the box in the New row. Then, make sure to check the Change Topic #? box.

If you want to remove the topic altogether, simply check the Delete #? box.

IMPORTANT: When you are done making all the changes, click the 'Save Changes' button at the top. Otherwise, your changes will not register.

Back to Conference

When you are done making all of your Conference Manager changes, click this button to go back to the conference and view your changes. Another way to do this would be to simply close the Conference Manager window.