Before I begin, I should make it clear that the information on
this page is not required, but suggestions only. However, they are
suggestions coming from a group of people (OIT) who have had the
chance to play around with COW and figure out what is appropriate
for COW and what is not.
What kind of material should I prepare
COW is designed for quick and easy presentation and exchange of
ideas, as you probably noticed. By the same token, it is not
very user-friendly when it comes to records, databases, or any
type of bulk information you need to keep track of. So, if you
have extensive syllabi, notes, or other text-heavy documents,
you may want to keep those on a regular web site. If you are a
School of Social Work instructor, please visit the
OIT
site to get help with this. Here is the kind of information
you may want to place in COW:
On the conference page
- Links to Syllabi
- Text explaining a little about the class
- Text explaining a little about the specific purposes
of the conference
On the topic pages
- Links to resources pertinent to this topic
- Text explaining what is appropriate in this topic
The material you prepare may be of any format, whether hard
copy or digital. You may also have pictures on your
conference, though these would have to be of either a .gif
format or .jpg. For any kind of pictures or other non-text
information you want in your conference, you will have to take a
few extra steps, as described below:
- Create a directory somewhere within your personal server
space to hold all the photos and what not. Place all of your
files in that directory. For example, I created a directory COW
in my Public/html directory, whose extension is as follows:
/~dwinkel/Public/html/COW
- You can then put images (for example) in that directory.
I could put a image of a cow in there called "cow.jpg".
- I can now link to that content from within COW with
the special URL:
/cgi-bin/image?http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dwinkel/COW/cow.jpg
Your URL will obviously be different, depending on where your
web space is, and what file names you use.
The reason for all of this extra work is that
COW is considered a secure environment by your WWW navigator, in
that you are required to use a password to enter and everything
that makes up COW is held on one computer, which only the COW
Administrators have access to. For this reason, you must make a
special 'secure' link from the COW computer to your directory
before you can import any outside files.
Disclaimer
You should be careful that you are not breaking any copyright
violations with the material you place on COW. For more
information about copyrights, you may visit the following site:
www.copyright.com.