CHEMCONF '98 1998 SCHOOL-YEAR ON-LINE CONFERENCE January 16 to May 1, 1998 Sponsored by the American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Education Organized by Donald Rosenthal, Department of Chemistry, Clarkson University, and Tom O'Haver, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, The University of Maryland at College Park. Hosted by the Computer Science Center, University of Maryland at College Park, Jennifer Fajman, Director. INSTRUCTIONS FOR PARTICIPANTS A. BEFORE THE CONFERENCE 1. Registration. To register for this conference, simply subscribe to the conference Listserv list, if you are not already subscribed. Send e-mail to LISTSERV@UMDD.UMD.EDU or LISTSERV@UMDD.BITNET in which the first line of the message body reads: SUBSCRIBE CHEMCONF your-first-and-last-name Send this message from the e-mail account that you wish to use for the conference. 2. If for any reason you wish to cancel your registration, send e-mail to LISTSERV@UMDD.UMD.EDU containing the message SIGNOFF CHEMCONF Make sure that you send this message from the SAME MAIL ADDRESS that you subscribed from. 3. If you need technical help, send e-mail to the conference organizer, Tom O'Haver, to2@umail.umd.edu. 4. To access the conference schedule, abstracts, papers, and other material, you will need access to the Internet, preferably to the Word Wide Web (WWW) with a graphical browser such as Netscape. Point your WWW browser to: http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/Chemistry/ChemConference/ChemConf98 B. DURING THE CONFERENCE 1. SHORT QUESTIONS The first week of each session is reserved for the reading of the papers in that session and for sending SHORT QUESTIONS to the authors or other participants. A specific day is designated for SHORT QUESTIONS on each paper. For example, it is expected that Paper 1 will be read on or before June 2. In reading the paper you may have a short question for the author asking for more information or clarification of points raised in the paper. A SHORT QUESTION may be directed to the author of Paper 1 on June 2 via the listserv. This will alert other participants as well as the author to the question. SHORT QUESTIONS may be directed to the other participants rather than the author on the designated day. DISCUSSION of the paper WILL NOT START until at least a week after the designated time for SHORT QUESTIONS. This gives authors (and participants) at least a week to prepare answers to SHORT QUESTIONS. 2. DISCUSSION A specific two days during each session is devoted to the discussion of each paper. Answers to SHORT QUESTIONS are to be sent at the beginning of the session. To send comments or questions about a particular conference paper to the entire conference, WAIT UNTIL THE DAYS DESIGNATED FOR DISCUSSION OF THAT PAPER, then mail your message to CHEMCONF@umdd.umd.edu or CHEMCONF@umdd.bitnet Please include the PAPER NUMBER, YOUR INITIALS AND THE TOPIC IN THE SUBJECT LINE of the message (e.g. "Paper 1 -AB: Role of the Teacher") so that participants can more easily sort out conference discussions from other e-mail. Please remember that messages sent to CHEMCONF will be distributed to all CHEMCONF participants, adding to their e-mail burden. As a courtesy to other participants, please keep your messages concise, limit your discussion to the topic of the paper in question, and avoid irrelevant, redundant, and personal comments that are not of general interest. Comments about conference procedure should be directed to Tom O'Haver (to2@umail.umd.edu) or Don Rosenthal (rosen@CLVM.clarkson.edu). 3. To send comments or questions privately to the author of the paper only, send your message to the author's e-mail address given in the paper. Reports of typographical errors, spelling and grammatical errors should be sent directly to the author, not to CHEMCONF. Only the authors can see these messages. You can send these messages at any time. 4. To send comments or questions about the operation of the conference to the conference organizers, send your message to to2@umail.umd.edu and rosen@clvm.clarkson.edu. Only the conference organizers can see these messages. You may send these messages at any time. 5. To send commands to the LISTSERV host computer (e.g. to SUBSCRIBE, SIGNOFF, get HELP, turn mail off and on, etc.), send the commands to listserv@umdd.umd.edu. Refer to Appendix 1 for a list of commands accepted by LISTSERV. Don't make the mistake of sending commands to CHEMCONF, as that will send the commands to the conference participants instead. You can send these commands at any time. 6. To TURN OFF mail from the conference during discussion periods you are not interested in, send the command SET CHEMCONF NOMAIL to LISTSERV@UMDD.UMD.EDU; to turn the mail back ON, send the command SET CHEMCONF MAIL to LISTSERV@UMDD.UMD.EDU. C. DURING THE GENERAL DISCUSSION PERIOD The general discussion period is an open period for public discussion of any points brought up by the papers or by earlier discussion and for general observations concerning the topics of the conference. During this period, anyone may begin a new "thread" by contributing a message with a new subject line. Participants responding to such messages should use the SAME subject line, so as to help everyone sort out the overlapping threads of conversation. THE CAREFUL USE OF SUBJECT LINES IS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT DURING THE GENERAL DISCUSSION PERIOD. If you are not interested in the general discussion, send the command SET CHEMCONF NOMAIL to LISTSERV@UMDD.UMD.EDU on July 29. D. AFTER THE CONFERENCE At the start of the conference, an evaluation form will be made available to all participants. We ask that you answer the questions on that form and return your answers to to2@umail.umd.edu. This will help us to evaluate the conference and make improvements the next time such a conference is conducted. After that, you may sign off at any time by sending SIGNOFF CHEMCONF to listserv@umdd.umd.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------- APPENDIX 1: LISTSERV COMMANDS The following is a list of commands that are accepted by the LISTSERV host computer. You may send these commands as e-mail messages to listserv@umdd.umd.edu Don't make the mistake of sending commands to CHEMCONF, as that will send the commands to the conference participants instead. Make sure that you send commands from the SAME MAIL ADDRESS that you subscribed from. You can send these commands at any time. SUBSCRIBE CHEMCONF Register for the conference SIGNOFF CHEMCONF Cancel your registration You can use the following commands to turn off and on the flow of messages during the conference in order to selectively view only the discussion of the papers that interest you: SET CHEMCONF NOMAIL Temporarily turn off mail deliveries SET CHEMCONF MAIL Turn mail deliveries back on The following commands cause the LISTSERV to return the indicated information to you by e-mail: REVIEW CHEMCONF BY NAME List of all CHEMCONF subscribers INDEX CHEMCONF List of files in the CHEMCONF database GET CHEMCONF LOG9606 Monthly transcript of CHEMCONF traffic for 06/96 HELP List of commonly used LISTSERV commands INFO PRESENT Introduction to LISTSERV for new users INFO GENINTRO General information about LISTSERV You may request any number of items in one mail message, each item on a separate line. Each item will be sent to you in a separate mail message. Depending on the network load, these materials will be mailed to you within a few minutes or hours, although longer delays are possible. --------------------------------- APPENDIX 2: HELPFUL HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS a. One of the problems of an e-mail based conference is sorting out all the overlapping threads of conversation. When you are responding to or asking about a specific passage in a paper or message, a very helpful technique is to quote a small passage from that paper or message in your response and to place a ">" character at the beginning of each quoted line, e.g.: > We used the....so-and-so...in order to.... We tried that too, but we found that.... The ">" character in this example is an e-mail convention indicating that that line is quoted from another message. There is no need to re-type the quoted passage if you have saved it on the file system of your computer; just Copy and Paste the desired passage into your message, then type ">" characters in front of each line. Another helpful technique to refer to a previous message is to specify the time and date, and the contents of the subject line. (For example, 6-11 8:43 EST AB: Role of the Teacher) This may make it easier to find a particular message. The Index or Filelist contains the time and date and the contents of the Subject line of the message. b. Many mail systems have a "Reply" command that saves you the trouble of typing the return address. Be careful when using the reply command when you want to make a PERSONAL reply to the originator of the message (rather that a public repsonse). Different mail programs handle this differently: some reply only to the list (i.e. your reply goes to the entire list so everyone sees it) and some mail programs give you a choice of replying to the list or to the originator of the message (PINE is like that). Please do not use the Reply command unless you know how it operates on your system and you can appropriately alter the Subject line. You can tell that an incoming e-mail message is from CHEMCONF because its header will have a "Sender" line like this: Sender: Conferences on Chemistry Research and Education in addition to the "From" line that tells you who originated the message. Messages from individuals have no Sender line. c. Don't send messages by "attaching" a word processor document to an email message. Other participants use different email systems and different word processors and may not be able to detach, decode, and view your message. It's better to use the universal Copy and Paste commands to copy text typed in a word processor and paste it into the message body of the outgoing email message. Test to make sure your email system "word wraps" (adds return characters so that no line exceeds 70 or 80 characters). If it does not, you will have to type return characters yourself to end each line, otherwise you messages will look very ragged and "chopped up" on other peoples' screens. d. If you use your word processor to compose messages off- line, limit your text to "plain ASCII", i.e. don't use special characters that ASCII e-mail can't handle and that other people's computers can't display properly, e.g. Greek characters, special math characters, "curley quotes", subscripts, bullets, em-dashs, the "degree" symbol, arrows, European characters (accents, tilde, umlaut, etc.), control characters (e.g.form-feeds, tabs, escape sequences, etc.). boldface, underlining, or italics. Change the font of the entire text to a mono-spaced font and adjust the margins so that the line length never exceeds 70 characters. If your word processor or text editor is of the type that simulates a left margin by inserting leading spaces in front of each line, set the left margin to zero. Replace tab formatting with spaces. (Remember that the effect of TAB CHARACTERS in a document depends on the position of the TAB STOPS in the reader's editor or terminal program, which you can not predict. So you have to format indented lines and tables using spaces, assuming a mono-spaced font). Save the document in "text only" format with a carriage return at the end of each line. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Tom O'Haver Professor of Analytical Chemistry University of Maryland Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry College Park, MD 20742 Maryland Collaborative for Teacher Preparation (301) 405-1831 to2@umail.umd.edu FAX: (301) 314-9121 http://www.wam.umd.edu/~toh