The Topic Manager

The Conference Manager is designed to let you set up the top level of your conference: access rights, description, list of topics, etc. The Topic Manager, on the other hand, lets you define each topic in more detail, including the topic message, additional access rights, and the ability to manage conversations.

To enter the Conference Manager, you entered the conference main page and used the link at the top of the page. There are two ways to get to the Topic Manager: 1) After you create a topic, you should see a link that allows you to edit that new topic; 2) When you look at the bottom of your conference page you see a list of the topics; you may click on any of these topic names to enter the topic page; toward the bottom of the page you should see a message that looks like this...

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

Click on that link; a new browser window will open up with the Topic Manager in it. Note that there is only one Conference Manager per conference, as can be expected. However, each topic in the conference has its own Topic Manager, so to speak. However, to keep you from getting confused, whenever you click into a Topic Manager page, the top of the page will tell you the name and number of the topic you are now editing.

The Topic Manager looks very similar to the Conference Manager. You have several buttons, each of which allows you to edit some part of the topic. Again, I will describe each of these pages below.

• Edit Topic
• User Access List
• Freeze Conversation
• Clear Conversation
• Remove Conversation
• Hiding Responses
• Arrange Topics
• Conference Manager
• Back to Topic

Edit Topic

This is the page that comes up first when you get into the Topic Manager. It allows you to change several things:
• Title: The name in the box is the current title for this topic. If you want to change it, simply delete the words in the box and write the new title.
• Related Topics (comma separated list of topic numbers): Again, in order to fill this box out you have to remember what number goes with what topic. To make the related topic link, just list the numbers for the related topics in this manner: 5,7,12,8
• Access: (to this topic only. access to Bagel Discussion is controlled separately) Here you can click the corresponding button to make the topic either private or topic. The default is public unless you specified otherwise when creating the topic. Remember that to change the 'membership' to this topic you should go to the User Access List part of the Topic Manager.
• Allow participants to start new conversations (in this topic): allows you to restrict who can start conversations to just the fair witnesses. For a tightly controlled discussion forum, this can be very useful to direct discussion.
• Topic Text: This is the text that participants will see upon entering the topic page. The same rules that you followed for making the Conference Welcome Message apply here. Don't forget to use the Preview option before you click the Change Topic button.

User Access List

Like I mentioned before, you have the option of making your conference private (let's call it Bagel Discussion for the purpose of this tutorial). This means that you, as the fair witness, decide who should be allowed into the Bagel Discussion conference and who should not. Let's say that this conference has four topics: 1. eating methods, 2. tales from the factory, 3. Sesame, and 4. Onion. Let's also say that the Onion group has some secret recipe they're not ready to share with everybody just yet. You can make topic 4 private, meaning that only the people belonging to the Onion group can enter the Onion topic. Note that 'membership' in the Onion topic doesn't prevent those people from going into any other topics.

A more realistic reason for making a topic private is, for example, if you wanted an arena where only the Professor, GSI's, and graders could post and read messages.

When you created your topic, you had the option of making it private by checking the appropriate box in the Create New Topic page. If you didn't check this box, then your new topic was automatically made public to everyone in the conference. That being the case, you can't use the User Access List button here in the Topic Manager (if you did, you would get an error message). An access list can only be defined if you specified that the topic is private. If at some later point in time you decide to make the topic private-access-only, you can make this change in the Edit Topic page, as described above. At any rate, if the topic is private you may click this button.

The process to add or remove members from a private Topic's Access List is identical to that of the Conference's Access List (if the conference is private). I described this process before. Click here to review.

Freezing Conversations

COW is a very free, open forum for discussion. By the same token, it is very likely that some conversations will go astray. If you are an instructor, you may want to put some boundaries on the material under discussion. If a conversation does get out of hand, though, you have the option of freezing it. Freezing a conversation simply means that no more messages may be posted to the conversation. The conversation is still there, meaning that people can still go back and review the old messages in it. They just can't submit any new messages.

To freeze a conversation, first use the drop-down list under 'Select a Conversation:' (click the down arrow). You should see an ordered list of all the conversations in the topic. Next to each number there is first a word yes or no, and then the title of the conversation. The word Yes means that the conversation is frozen. No means that the conversation is thawed or unfrozen, which is what conversations normally are. Use your mouse to choose a conversation and then click the 'Toggle Freeze' button. This button flips the state of a conversation: if it is frozen, using this button thaws the conversation; vice versa.

Clearing Conversations

This screen works much the way that the freezing of conversations works. This is used to clear out the responses of a conversation. Please Note: Once you clear the responses out of a conversation, it is not possible for you to retrieve them again.

Removing Conversations

This screen also works much the way that the freezing of conversations works. This is used to delete a conversation. Please Note: Once you delete a conversation, it is not possible for you to retrieve it again.

Hiding Responses

If a participant posts a message to a conversation and later regrets having sent that message, they can't actually edit the message. Their only option is to hide the message. They way to do this is to look back into that conference using the [go back one day], [go back one week], or [go back one month] links. Then, when they see their old message, they would also see a link that allows them to hide the message. It would look like this: [ hide/unhide ].

There is a safety built into COW whereby you can only hide or unhide messages you post. The only exception to that is that fair witnesses have the right to hide any message they wish, whether they posted it or not. Also, if you as the fair witness hide one of the student's messages, they cannot go in and unhide it. You have the last word!

Arrange Topics

Don't be confused. This is exactly the same page you saw in the Conference Manager. To see a description of how to use this page, click here.

Conference Manager

This button simply allows you quick passage to the Conference Manager page.

Back to Topic

As expected, this button links you back to the topic you just edited and refreshes the page to show you the changes you just made. Another way to do this would be to simply close the Topic Manager window and hit the "Reload" or "Refresh" button on your browser.