Instructions for studying this course off-line
This course consists of three kinds of items:
- There are information pages about the course subject.
These pages can be read in a different order by every student.
In order to ensure that this personal choice does not lead to
information you cannot understand because of missing foreknowledge,
and to avoid leading you to the same pages over and over again without
you knowing it, the course uses
adaptive hypermedia
techniques.
This implies that the text and the links you see are not static.
- There are a series of multiple choice tests, one after each "section"
and one at the end. These tests are evaluated by a server-side script.
- There is an assignment, which consists of a large linear document
which you must transform into a hyperdocument.
Using this course off-line involves a series of steps, which depend on
your computing environment.
These steps are slightly different for Windows and for Unix systems.
If you have downloaded the course text (and supporting software) before
and only wish to update the content, your can download an
update zip file.
It only contains the "2L690" directory.
Microsoft Windows'95, Windows'98 and Windows NT
- You need to download a zip archive
which contains a Java Runtime Environment, A Java-based Webserver
and the actual course text and software.
- You must unzip the archive in the directory
C:\ where it creates a directory called "Jigsaw".
This is the name of the Webserver, which is supplied by the
World Wide Web consortium (W3C).
The courseware will not work if you install it in another directory
or on another drive.
In order to use another directory or drive the server needs to be
reconfigured and this is a complicated task for which you need to consult
the documentation on the W3C site.
- Each time you wish to use the courseware you must start the
Webserver, through a batch file: C:\Jigsaw\Jigsaw\bin\jigsaw.bat.
(It may be convenient to place a shortcut to that batch file on your desktop.)
- The Webserver listens to port 8001 on the local loopback 127.0.0.1.
To connect to the server and log on to the course you must connect to
http://127.0.0.1:8001/2L690/.
- The courseware generates and maintains two files in the directory
C:\Jigsaw\Jigsaw\logs\2L690, one with a name ending in "log"
and one with a name ending in "model".
When you have finished studying this course and begin to work on the
assignment you should
email these two files to the professor
in order to have them
in place in the on-line server by the time you wish to submit your assignment.
Do not be alarmed when the batch file reports the server is "not logging".
The course software will be logging and its logfiles are all you
need.
Unix
- You need to download a
gzipped tar archive which contains
a Java-based Webserver and the actual course text and software.
This archive does not contain a Java Runtime Environment.
You must install a Java Runtime Environment yourself!
- You must unzip the archive in the directory
/usr/local where it creates a directory called "Jigsaw".
This is the name of the Webserver, which is supplied by the
World Wide Web consortium (W3C).
The courseware will not work if you install it in another directory
or on another drive.
In order to use another directory or drive the server needs to be
reconfigured and this is a complicated task for which you need to consult
the documentation on the W3C site.
- Each time you wish to use the courseware you must start the
Webserver, through a shell script:
/usr/local/Jigsaw/Jigsaw/bin/jigsaw
(It may be convenient to include /usr/local/Jigsaw/Jigsaw/bin
in your PATH environment variable.)
You may need to edit this shell script to ensure that the paths to the
Java Runtime Environment and its class files are correct.
- The Webserver listens to port 8001 on the local loopback 127.0.0.1.
To connect to the server and log on to the course you must connect to
http://127.0.0.1:8001/2L690/.
- The courseware generates and maintains two files in the directory
/usr/local/Jigsaw/Jigsaw/logs/2L690,
one with a name ending in "log" and one with a name ending in "model".
When you have finished studying this course and begin to work on the
assignment you should
email these two files to the professor
in order to have them
in place in the on-line server by the time you wish to submit your assignment.
Do not be alarmed when the batch file reports the server is "not logging".
The course software will be logging and its logfiles are all you
need.