Our LIS 540 Community

What is this?   Since this is a course about information architecture, systems and retrieval, you might find it interesting to arbitrarily change the architecture of our course webpage as it sits in your browser, by exploiting the fact that the information system represented by your web browser constructs the course webpage. By changing the look-and-feel as well as the functionality of our course webpage, you may be changing the manner in which you retrieve information from our course web page.

If you have suggestions about changing the architecture of some of our course webpages, send them to me and I'll see if I can write a Greasemonkey script. It might be an interesting experiment in user-centered design.

What is this?    I am logging the web traffic of our course website. Each week I process the raw traffic counts and produce a summary of use. You can study the summary and see how our class is using the course website, which pages your peers are reading and which pages your peers are ignoring. (Of course, it is also interesting to me, as teacher and creator of these webpages, to see how our class is reacting to various class webpages. For example, is the class reading the readings? Which readings? Etc.)

What is this?    Terry's attempt at literature. Is this the "Great American Novel"? Read it and judge for yourself.

What is this?    Use the course listserv to send a message to everyone registered in the class, Terry included. If you respond to the listserv, your response is sent to everyone.

What is this?   Send Terry a message. He will respond just to you (providing he has time and he feels like it, etc.)

What is this?   Use the anonymous e-mail to send Terry an e-mail anonymously. Since he won't know who sent the message, he won't be able to respond to you. (Of course, he may not feel like it!)

What is this?   This is a class discussion list. Students can talk about class topics, assignments, etc. Here are some pointers about using a discussion list. Our discussion list becomes active on September 18, 2006. Note that messages will be archived after 21 days. You can still view these messages, but you have to look for them in the 'archive' section.

What is this?   This is our class first-draft wiki. Everyone in the class should have a page on the first-draft wiki. Use this page to write your first draft for our course. Basic editing with our class wiki.

What is this?   This is a social discovery tool. As members of our class surf the web they can 'dot' pages. By logging on to our class page at Blue.us you can see what web resources your peers have found.

To create a Dot for our class, the only thing *required* is to:

- Select to share 'All Blue.Us Users'
- Enter the tag: LIS 540

All the other items are optional.