November Events, 2006

Paul Kates, Mathematics & Engineering Faculty LT3 Liaison

Events Summary

UW-ACE News

UW-ACE Winter 2007 Course Requests

Request a UW-ACE course for the winter 2007 term by sending a note to Paul Kates (pkates@uwaterloo.ca) or to uwacehelp@ist.uwaterloo.ca. Please give the course abbreviation (e.g. MATH 199), names of additional instructors and TAs, if known, and your preference for a new, blank course or one copied from a previous term.

Pre-scheduled UW-ACE sessions by IST are no longer being offered. Individuals, department and faculty groups can contact me to arrange times for sessions on their topics of interest, e.g. gradebook and Quest mark handling, communication via email, forums and calendar, writing LaTeX-quality math in UW-ACE pages and quizzes without using postscript or PDF documents.

A 21 page pdf guide to the Gradebook is available in the Help area of UW-ACE.

Instructions for exporting course grades from UW-ACE for electronic submission to the Quest system, plus Quest import directions, are located at www.quest.uwaterloo.ca/help/howdoi/grades_submission.html

IE7 and UW-ACE

Apple Mac OS X users can skip this section. There are no plans for IE7 on Macs.

IST recommends that installation of the Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 browser IE7 be delayed for the time being because UW-ACE, Quest, Trellis and other software at UW still needs re-tuning to work with the much changed and improved browser. IST's Windows software updating service will not be installing IE7 on PCs until later in the term. This information was presented in the Daily Bulletin on Monday, November 13th, 2006.

If, however, your upgrades come via Microsoft's Automatic Updates service, click the "Custom Install" option to look at the selection of ready-to-install program upgrades and decline the IE7 upgrade, if you wish to. Later, IE7 can be downloaded from Microsoft.

The look-and-feel of IE7 is different from IE6 and other browsers. Here are two recent reviews of the browser from CNET and PC World and some untested advice on how to retrieve the familiar browser Menu bar.

If IE7 is already on your Windows XP/Server machine it can be uninstalled, at which point IE6 will work again. IE6 is still available from Microsoft if the uninstall fails. Microsoft does not support running IE6 and IE7 on the same machine. Unofficial ways to do this are on the Internet. Using virtual machines with separate copies of Windows XP may be the best way to keep IE6 and try IE7.

Making UW-ACE courses part of the university community

As with earlier versions of UW-ACE, access to course content like the syllabus, assignments, FAQs, subject resources etc is controllable through settings made available to course instructors. Confidential information about names and grades is restricted and protected by default. Different access levels - instructor, student (in course), UW member, general public - can be assigned to each command tab and every individual item in the main Lessons folder. Instructors can thus share their course with potential students, other courses and faculty members or the general public.

By default, the Resources tab and the syllabus located within the Resources tab have public-access settings. Using the UW-ACE course search feature, students can read the syllabus of any UW-ACE course.

UW-ACE course Lesson pages look like Windows folders by default, but they are not file directories. Each folder is a HTML web page that instructors can add to - text, style, layout and colour HTML features. Even JavaScript can be used. (See, for example, jsMath, a JavaScript program that translates LaTeX math expressions into LaTeX-quality HTML mathematics.)

LT3 Events

TRACE Events

TRACE Workshops

See the above link for registration details. Workshops are popular and seating is limited.

Lectures

CS4U UWaterloo Day

Saturday, November 18, 2006, 9:30 am to 4:30 pm

Location: Davis Centre, University of Waterloo.
Register here.

Grades 9, 10 and 11 students, their families, and teachers are invited to CS4U @ UWaterloo Day to see how computer science is changing the world.

The activities of the day require no computer science background - every student and teacher is welcome! Attendance is free. Refreshments and pizza lunch will be provided.

CS Webpage Banner Contest

Deadline: Friday, November 17th, 2006

The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science is holding a contest to create a new banner for the main CS webpage. They say "... be creative, and have fun with it!".

How To Enter: Create a banner, 755 x 144 pixels (which is the UW standard). Submit your entry to: Suzana Pinto, s2pinto@cs.uwaterloo.ca. Entries will be judged by the School Commons Committee. The contest is open to the UW community.

WatITis 2006

Wednesday December 6, 2006, all day

WatITis is a one day conference for those involved in IT planning, support and decision making at the University of Waterloo. It is an opportunity to see what others are doing on campus in information technology, to exchange ideas, and make new contacts.

See the link above for session listings and registration.

MEng Program Open House

Thursday November 23, 2006, 5-7pm

Information Open House on the new Master of Engineering in ECE, a certificate in Computer Networking and Security, Management Engineering, Software Engineering, or Sustainable Energy.
Location: EIT 3142

Library Events

Library workshops about building research skills for graduate and undergraduate students are held throughout the fall 2006 term.

E-journal articles subscribed to by the library can quickly be made available to a class through eReserves, the library's online course resource system. In these cases no further copyright permissions are needed. See these library sites for more information:

Orchestra@uwaterloo Concert

Thursday November 30, 2006, 8pm

Au revoir, Mozart!
Humanities Theatre in J.G. Hagey Hall of the Humanities
University of Waterloo
Featuring: Jeffrey Quilliam, clarinet, winner in the 2006 Concerto Competition

Program:
Arthur Bliss Fanfare: For the Lord Mayor of London
Johannes Brahms Tragic Overture
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Concerto for Clarinet in A Major
Antonmn Dvorak Symphony No. 8 in G Major

Tickets: $10 ($5 student/senior; free for UW students). Tickets can be picked up from the Humanities Theatre Box Office, noon-5, M-F, or reserved by phone 519 888-4908.

Lecture Podcasting

Read about how and why to podcast lectures.

MathFrog and WiredMath

Two sites for playing and learning about mathematics, for grades 4 to 9. Very popular (10s of thousands of hits per month) with kids, parents and teachers.

Maple, MapleTA and On-line Quiz Systems

Read about teaching mathematics using the computer algebra system Maple and the computer algebra assignment and quiz system MapleTA.

In addition to MapleTA, June Lowe (x33888) in Engineering uses a quiz system based on Adobe's AuthorWare software to conduct CDTs - Computer Delivered Tutorials. Typically, students work in pairs on short problems based on the concepts and techniques discussed in class.

This quiz system is similar to the UW-ACE quiz system in question types, and doesn't incorporate a computer algebra engine like MapleTA, but unique among the three quiz systems is its flow-chart style construction method and its ability to include control logic (like a program) within a quiz. A demonstration can be arranged by calling June at x33888.

UW-ACE Updated

Starting in the fall of 2006, UW-ACE has been updated to version 7.1 of the ANGEL learning management system. Here's a list of the most obvious changes to UW-ACE brought by 7.1:

Supported browsers:

UW-ACE Documentation

Documentation about the new look of UW-ACE (ala ANGEL 7.1) is available from the UW-ACE Help page:

And more UW documentation is under preparation. Several ANGEL documents about version 7.1 are also available:

Past Events

October, 2006 December, 2005
September, 2006 November, 2005
August, 2006 October, 2005
July, 2006 September, 2005
May, 2006 August, 2005
April, 2006 July, 2005
March, 2006 June, 2005
February, 2006 May, 2005
January, 2006 April, 2005

Liaison Information

Paul Kates,
Mathematics & Engineering Faculty LT3 Liaison,
pkates@uwaterloo.ca, x37047

This page is located at www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~pkates/LT3/events.html.

More information about the services of the Centre for Learning and Teaching through Technology - LT3 is available at lt3.uwaterloo.ca/.

More information about learning and teaching Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering, plus a description of the services I provide as Mathematics & Engineering Faculty LT3 Liaison is available here.