Put in request for departmental secondary accounts chinext and asiancan. Also put in requests for a mysql database to go with each.
For "administrative" projects hosted on enterprise servers, the request for mysql dbs goes through helpdesk who forwards them to sysadmin. For "research" project on HCMC servers, go directly to sysadmin.
May 10, 2010
Got request for modifications to half a dozen pages (course listings mostly) on the medieval studies site. Forwarded those to Judy, who did the work. A couple of issues came up that she asked advice on: when to delete rather than comment out code, and how to minimize the risks of invalidating the code when making structural changes (edit by drilling down through structural element,rather than sequentially character by character. simple e.g. create open and close tags for each element before putting in any content)
CC of French wanted to replace the image of a book cover with a screen snap of a research project. MH provided me the screen snap and I inserted it into the site.
LW noted that numbers were appearing on the course description page immediately before links to files for course materials. After some poking around I discovered that the code that generates the individual professor's details on the courses page had a bit of debug code that displayed the value of the loop counter on the page. Commented out that code and everything fine
week of May 3 - May 7 (M +1 ENGL 140 followup, T -1 Dentist, W -2 CSG, R +1 siberian)
JJ asked to add a new item called "Livery Companies". No problem adding the appopriate user interface elements, but I'm not sure how to implement the actual data structures. If the company can be pinned to a location on the map, I'll treat them one way (similar to churches etc likely) and if not, then I'll have to treat them another way. (possibly similar to other student topics, or wards). That's as far as I've got.
Met with AWR to brainstorm possible ways of providing support for English 140. Notes from meeting appended below. Seemed to me (especially after talk with GN and MH) that Moodle would be appropriate, and that for a course of this size they could expect some time from the Moodle support people on campus.
Arranged for me to meet with SG to review their needs and confirm that Moodle could meet them, and probably at lower cost and hassle then any other option. That meeting confirmed my recommendation. The Moodle people are already supporting ENGL 135 which is a bit bigger and more unruly administratively than this course.
wrote to AWR suggesting she contact the 135 instructor and also contact SG directly to discuss the specifics and I'd be happy to consult if she felt it would be helpful.
2 lecture sections / term, each with 180 students
20 tutorial sections / term, each with 20 students
course content:
- 4 major works, each studied for 3 weeks
- 8 submissions
- exposure to range of literary study techniques
- focus on close reading (e.g. take sentence, write a paragraph)
dept:
- wants to expose students to range of scholarship, as retention tool
- wants grad students to do more teaching
- this course as model for future for other courses
profs:
- 1 professor teaches both sections in a given term
- likely 3 or 4 profs will rotate term by term
- each prof may have different usage
- each prof will want to be able to archive their material for re-use
features:
- instructor has to have site accessible to all students in course with
general course stuff and stuff specific to current work being studied
- each tutorial section has to have site (accessible to all course
students probably OK if more restrictive access administratively hard)
- mechanism for students to submit work to instructors
- mechanism for instructors to forward exemplary work to instructor for
inclusion on page accessible to all - this archive likely to be retained
and expanded from year to year
- area whose access is restricted to instructor and ta's
misc:
- not sure about instructors' confidence with Moodle
The SSL certificate for hcmc.uvic.ca will expire on July 23, 2010; I wrote to jralbert to authorize expenditure of $183 to renew that certificate. [RT#179508]
TEF 225 is a meeting room. To book it, you have to go through room bookings. I was instructed to email request to Jan House (jhouse@uvic.ca) with name, department, room and time
Submitted Joint Job Evaluation questionnaires for JN, GN and me to dean. I gave him a quick summary of the top couple of features in each (change in governance structure, change in booking and administering of drop-in labs and bookable research lab) and how those might be expected to affect the three positions. He asked me to have each of us work out the points for our numerical ratings and review to make sure that the numerical ratings and text descriptions reconciled. I did that and after getting the results submitted them to AR. He's looked at each of them independently, but will now look at them jointly to ensure that they reconcile with each other as well as internally. He'll then bring any concerns to our attention for discussion.