🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm part of a committee charged with devising an electronic event for
the next California Association of Academic Computing conference, this
spring, at U.C. Davis. I thought the participants in this group might
have some ideas to contribute.
 
We are trying to demonstrate the power of a wide are network for
educators. The participants in this conference are mostly community
college and Cal State faculty. There will be about 200 people here, and
most will have little or no exposure to Internet, Usenet, or any other
wide area network.

The event can be hands on, or more of a demonstration. The only
restriction for a hands-on session is that we will have to break the
group into 4 or 5 person teams, since I don't think I can get more than
about 50 live terminals set up in one place. For a demonstration, we
have access to all kinds of stuff - a local fiber optic network,
satellite uplink for computer and video, Barco color video projector,
etc.

One idea that's been discussed is a sort of network scavenger hunt. We
can give all the participants some basic instruction in things like FTP
and e-mail in advance of the event. Then we set up a task - retrieve
certain information from a certain place, solve the puzzle, answer these
questions, or whatever. The clues/information needed are in files at FTP
sites, or in the hands of volunteers on the network sitting at their
terminals for the two hour duration of the event, waiting for e-mail. We
can probably even get a vendor to donate valuable prizes (insert
fanfare) for the winning team.

So, any great ideas out there? We want to send these people home
convinced that the network is a really amazing resource. That shouldn't
be too hard, since it's true! Thanks for your time, and I hope this
didn't raise the S/N ratio of your group too much :-)


Ken Weiss
cckweiss@castor.ucdavis.edu