CREATE CASE TRANSFER MECHANISM

Students in ECh 5602 would both analyze and write case studies. These case studies would need critique from fellow-students assigned to the home group. As the cases neared completion, they would also need review from students in critique groups. The cases would be ten to twenty pages long. How could this information be sent and received from a variety of settings and campuses not all connected to the same system?

Various options (with over 20 e-mails among Miranda, Helen, Joel Ness [campus technology expert], and Scott Hollatz [campus Webmaster]) were explored. For example, Helen, the course instructor and Miranda, the student tech assistant tried to use Pop-Mail with Attachments through Netscape, knowing that all the students would have access to that Web Browser. What seemed like a good idea did not work as this Pop-Mail system was not compatiable with Pine and Elm, the e-mail systems used at UMD. Several times, Helen and Miranda lost their Pine/Elm e-mail messages in Cyberspace. Scott, the campus Webmaster had to rescue the mail from Cyberspace.

An excerpt from e-mail from Joel Ness to Helen, dated July 15, 1997.

We are going to be rolling out a very nice new e-mail program for Macintosh and Windows 95 this fall called Mulberry. It would be amuch better way of doing what you're doing then Netscape. Stay tuned for more info.

If you just want to send a message with a file attanchment you don't need to select the "Get Mail" button. Just choose "New mail messge" from the File menu, attach the file, and send it.

If you need to use Netscape to decode at attanchment, but don't want your mail deleted from the serve, go to the Options menus and select Mail and News Preferences. Then select the "servers" tab and within that screen select the "Leave on Server option. .....Do this if you usually use another email program to work with your mail.

An e-mail message from Helen to Scott Hollatz, dated July 16, 1997: In "talking" with Joel yesterday, we thought that changing the preferences in the pop-mail might help the sitaution...well, I tried it and it did not help. He e-mail has disappeared, but we have learned a valuable lesson re: our class. We will no go back to having our standents paste in their work in regular e-mail. With different platforms and different e-mail systems, this seems like the simpliest (and perhaps the only way) our project will work. So....if you will rescus me e-mail one more time, I don't think I'll need to bother you again with this issue.

Here is an excerpt from e-mail message from Scott Hollatz to Helen on July 17, 1997:

Your e-mail is now restored. You shouldn't read mail with different mail readers. The pop mail server will write your mail to a file different from the file elm expects it to be in.

In this case, you used popail (a pop client) which made the pop server write a separate mail file containing all your mail, then you used elm, which only know about the orinigal file.

The two files have been combined now, readable by elm.

Making the Decision

Use of regular e-mail for the initial writing and "home" group review was considered satisfactory. Fax machines would be used on an ITV day to "exchange" the cases for critique group review. How we longed for Course Management and conferencing systems where lengthy pieces of writing could be exchanged and critiqued--course templates like that developed by the College of Agriculture at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus, will be very useful next time we offer the course.

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