MSS May June 2000 Report

The first two weeks of May the term-end wrapping up of both my class and the classes I inherited from Hazel Kurapati occuppied the bulk of my time and energy.

The last two weeks of May I began work on the Final Performance Report.  Initial work focused on gathering, reviewing, editing, and posting all the relevant supporting reports to the College web site.  Two new reports were also written, Five Year Overview of Promotion Rates in Core Mathematics Courses at COM-FSM, and The Use of the Computer as a Tool in Science. 

The work on the actual Final Performance Report continued into the first week of June.   During this period other work was set aside to focus on producing the report.

Once the work was complete, the effort to convert the MathView notebooks into LiveMath and post them on the College web server began.  This effort had been awaiting the release of the LiveMath software which occurred late this Spring.  This material is accessible from http://www.comfsm.fm/~dleeling/math/math.html

Following that work, the Cognitive Approach materials were put on the College server in mid June.  These materials derived from the work done in MS 095 during the Fall of 1996.

Science

The purchase orders were prepared for the computers for Micronescience II.  This consists of three computers.  Each computer will have an Intel QX3 digital microscope attached.   One computer would go into A102, one into A103, and one into A204.

Chemistry

The Chemistry CDROMs are in hand.  Work remains to be done on installing them to a partition on the hard drive in the laboratory, mapping the clients, and testing the arrangement.

Anatomy and Physiology

The software was received.

Marine Biology

The fish catalog software arrived.

Biology

A textbook was located which provides for web and CD support. An examination copy was requested, this has never turned up.  No follow-up has occurred.

Training, Assistance, and Support

Work was done on the "Bilingual" data base on Dayle Dannis's desk for Greg Myers.  In late June Dayle and I got together for a single training session.  At this point she can enter data into the database and is proceeding to do so.

The transcript queries and report were rewritten in the Office of Admissions and Records.  The computer produces transcripts with degree information if that information has been entered in the Student Events table.  The transcripts are correct only if the repeated classes have been properly flagged.  Unfortunately this process is a manual process and not an automatic process.

Lab and Computer Matters

The laboratory has seen heavy use in the evenings by the dormitory students under the supervision of Josephine Albert.  Josephine has reported that the computer laboratory has provided an important recreational role for the dormitory students in the evenings.   The students spend most of their time engaged in chat either on TalkCity (Coconut Room) or CollegeClub.  The shift to CollegeClub chat rooms is recent and probably represents a trend based on a conversation with Josephine Albert.

The following table is the first eight rows of the "Web server access statistics for week of June 18, 2000:"

Note that TalkCity leads the list in terms of Requests.  The consumption of bandwidth of the College Internet connection is more accurately measured by the amount of data transferred.  When viewed from a bytes transferred point of view CollegeClub is the heavyweight by a large amount.

Note that 206.132.14.122 is also CollegeClub.

Gathering all of the CollegeClub statistics together reveals that CollegeClub is transferring double the data of TalkCity/Coconut Chat for almost the same number of requests.  CollegeClub is generating 318 Megabytes worth of data for 162 Kilobytes worth of requests.  Talkcity is generating 155 Mb worth of data for 160 K worth of requests.  Note that these numbers may appear to disagree with the table, but one kilobyte is 1024 bytes and one megabyte is 1,048,567 bytes.

There are some CollegeClub URLs below the top eight rows, such as search.collegeclub.com, that would add to this total.  Ads, which I presume appear on these sites, would also be a separate additional load.

I dropped by the CollegeClub site and the HighSchoolClub site to determine if they are related.  While there is some Corporate information on the CollegeClub site, the HighSchoolClub site is a "prerelease version" and does not appear to have Corporate information. Their logos have a similarity, otherwise there is no direct indication that they are related.

The Corporate information for CollegeClub is scanty, with a mission statement that reads: "Our goal is to be the leader in online communication, education and commerce for students, educators and alumni."

I spoke to Josephine Albert and learned the following.  On five separate occasions Talkcity was inaccessible from the laboratory, but CollegeClub was functional.   Josephine had thought the problem was at Telecom and said she called there once.   I then asked if other sites were working, and she said yes.  I explained that the problem was not at Telecom if only TalkCity was inoperational.  My own guess is that the TalkCity servers are going down or running at full capacity and not servicing any new logons. 

CollegeClub also offers more "options," bundling an online email account and instant messenger type functionality with each CollegeClub account.  Thus while chatting you can, I gather, send a picture of yourself to the other person's email account.  And the students have been, according to Josephine, receiving pictures.   I gather they might also be sending pictures using the scanner, but that was not made clear during our conversation.

Josephine said that as a result of the added functionality of CollegeClub, she was fairly certain that every dorm student who uses the laboratory now has a CollegeClub account.  She noted that students can belong to five or six different "clubs" (topic based) and receive information from each club. 

Josephine asked if the CollegeClub was a problem.  I said no, not as far as I was aware, only that the increased demand would result in slower responsiveness of the site.

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