To: English 305 Students
From: Dr. Miles – professormiles@hotmail.com
Welcome to English 305, Scientific and Technical Writing.
This course is offered in an exciting format, fit for Millennium
2000. You will take this course
completely online. You should keep this
message for future reference.
All the course materials are at our Web homepage:
http://www.as.wvu.edu/~tmiles/305.html
My e-mail address for this section is: professormiles@hotmail.com
You should send all e-mail for this course to this address.
As you’ll see when you consult the course calendar, we’ll be exchanging e-mails throughout the semester.
You can always e-mail me at professormiles@hotmail.com and expect an
answer within 48 hours. I take the
weekend off --- so if you send a message on Friday, I may not reply until
Tuesday.
The main focus of this course will be learning to write
effectively in your major field, and learning how to improve your writing by
using Web resources, including search engines and e-mail. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to
say that you’re a savvy user of the Web and that you can use this powerful
electronic environment to improve whatever writing you’re called upon to do as
a professional.
Since there are no lectures or class meetings, you must take
individual responsibility to familiarize yourself with this course.
Note about MIX:
Here is a description of MIX, from the MIX web site:
The Mountaineer
Information Xpress, or MIX, is a Web platform for WVU students and faculty. It
will provide new e-mail addresses for all students, serve as a centralized
location to register online for classes, check grades, find out about current
campus events, chat online with their classmates, and receive messages targeted
directly to them. The MIX is a digital tool to make communication easier for
all members of the WVU community - both faculty and students. It is accessible
from anywhere a user happens to be, at any time of the day or night. MIX is
powered by Campus Pipeline software.
You can use MIX for your e-mail for this course. You access MIX at: http://www.mix.wvu.edu/
. To find out your user name, password,
and e-mail address, click on “Frequently Asked Question.” Your username is your WVU ID, and your
password is the two digits of your birth day followed by the last four digits
of your SSN.
Be Sure To Have Your Own Individual E-mail Account
To take this course, you MUST have your own personal, individual Web-accessible
e-mail account, an account that is not used by anyone else.
I have found that when you
“share” an account, mail gets lost, e-mail addresses get confused, and
frustrations follow. If you happen to be
in a “living situation” where you and a partner/spouse/relative/friend/roommate
share one Internet connection (in order to economize), you should have a
personal Web-based e-mail account of your own and use it for this course. It’ll come in handy later, since these kinds
of accounts can be accessed anywhere in the world from any Web-connected PC.
MIX, Yahoo, and Hotmail all allow you to put active links to Web
sites in your e-mail. In MIX, you just
type in the Web address; in Yahoo, you use Color & Graphics; in Hotmail,
you use Rich Text Editor On. Many of the
course exercises require putting active links in your e-mail. Students have more trouble entering these
active links in AOL e-mail; if you have an AOL account, learn how to do this
immediately (two methods: (1) copy the
Web address into your e-mail; (2) when you have a Web site open, use the
heart-icon to pull the address into an e-mail message).
Whatever
e-mail account you decide to use, it must have these two key features:
·
private
·
web-accessible
Recommendation: You will be
creating your own individualized Web homepage for this course. An excellent combination of (FREE) e-mail and
web homepage space is available at Yahoo:
www.yahoo.com . If you don’t already have server space for a
homepage at the Internet Service Provider you use for e-mail (ISP broadband or
modem dial-up), I recommend that you create a new Yahoo e-mail account and then
use Yahoo for your web page (the service is actually at Geocities, through the
auspices of Yahoo). Your Yahoo account
will be universally accessible at any computer anywhere. I recommend this strategy because the
web-building capacity at MIX does not include easy-to-use homepage-building
software.
Note about Attachments: Do not
use the “Attachment” feature to send me any of your work. Just include your work in the body of the
e-mail message, using “Select” (Ctrl-A), “Copy” (Ctrl-C), and (once you’ve
multi-tasked over to your e-mail message) “Insert” (Ctrl-V).
There
are three problems with attachments: (1)
they can hide viruses; (2) they are not universally capable of being opened;
(3) you can’t edit their content and directly re-send them (that is, you have
to save them first, then edit them, and then re-attach them to a Reply).
Note about format: Many formatting features (like bold face, bullets, and tabs) do not
hold when you copy formatted text from Microsoft Word to an e-mail
message. Don’t worry about this. Formatting will only count, in terms of your
grade, on the major documents that you hand in.
at http://www.as.wvu.edu/~tmiles/305.html
Read the entries at the Course Materials link first. There you’ll find:
·
a complete overview of the course and how it works, under
Course Guidelines
·
a Course Calendar and Due Dates, with the syllabus laid out
week-by-week in a convenient table
·
all class assignments and exercises
·
and other materials to help you, under “TOOLS.” Be sure to explore all the links in this
section.
You should use the whole first week of the semester to familiarize
yourself fully with this Web site and all its resources and links. Plan to spend at least 6 hours doing this.
Be sure to read the Calendar carefully. There you’ll find exactly what to do week by
week.
Check out the MIX Message Board
By the end of the first week, you must also have checked in on the
English 305 MIX Message Board, and you must have learned how to navigate around
it. You should be checking in daily
throughout the semester.
You access the MIX Message Board through www.mix.wvu.edu and School Services/Course
Resources.
English 305 should be listed on your main page, if you’re
registered for the course.
The MIX Message Board will be a key to creating a community
learning- environment for this course.
For instance, when you or I post a topic there, everyone else can
comment on this topic, and all these comments can then be read by everyone. This process substitutes for traditional
classroom discussion. It’s called
“threaded discussion” because the contributions to the discussion thread
serially down the page, one after the other, so that you can read them in
sequence as they were posted. I think
you will find this feature useful and exciting.
By being a member of this class, you have the right to post questions
and comments to the MIX Message Board and then see who responds. You can get help with general questions about
the course, and you can contribute specialized knowledge that you might have
(especially about using the Web).
I check MIX Message Board almost every day.
When you send a message to Message Board, BE SURE TO SIGN IT. It’s important to keep all your e-mail correspondences professional, as well as to give them a personal touch!
There are three keys to keeping up in this course:
1. read the
Calendar and plan your work ahead
2. read the MIX
Message Board every day for the first three weeks of the course and then every
other day for the rest of the semester
3. stay in touch
with me by e-mail.
If you have any questions, please e-mail me: professormiles@hotmail.com
.
Or better yet, post them on the Message Board; that way, everyone
can see the answers.
For your information:
This course participates in West Virginia University's initiative
in Distance Education. I'm glad that
you've chosen to be part of this wave of educational innovation. English 305 is also enrolled in the Southern
Region Electronic Campus (SREC), meaning that students from West Virginia to
Texas to Florida to Maryland have the opportunity to take this course.
Best of luck as you start this course.
---- Dr. Miles professormiles@hotmail.com