Information Technology News Archive

1996 - 2017

NACS Electronic Educational Environment Staffing Update

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NACS’ participation in UCI’s Electronic Educational Environment is once again in full swing after a series of staffing challenges earlier in the year. Shohreh Bozorgmehri, NACS’ principal EEE coordinator, has returned from a few months away on maternity leave. Eric Friedman and Leonard Megliola, who left to accept jobs in the commercial sector, have been replaced by Eric Carter and David Baskin.

Eric, a former NACS student staff member, joins NACS once again after a year working for the UCI school of Humanities. Eric is EEE’s system administrator and helps support EEE Web tools. He is currently working on a pilot program with other EEE team members to evaluate the “WebCT” web course software.

David Baskin joins NACS from USC-Wrigley Institute, where he was their Webmaster. He was previously responsible for the National Academy of Sciences Web site for the Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications. David is helping plan and teach EEE workshops, providing assistance to instructors, and is participating in the enhancement of the EEE Web site to improve usability and functionality.

Fall Quarter EEE Activities

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UCI’s Electronic Education Environment (EEE) team is working with interested instructors on a pilot program to evaluate the WebCT web-based course development package (see http://www.webct.com). WebCT provides faculty with a set of web-browser software tools for developing course web pages. WebCT also provides a wide array of additional features that can be added to a course, including a conferencing system, on-line chat, student progress tracking, grade maintenance, and other tools.

EEE introduced a variety of new workshops during fall quarter including “Using EEE Tools to Compliment Class Instruction”, “Introduction to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)”, and “Creating Images for the Web.” Seehttp://eee.uci.edu/doc/workshops for schedules and registration information; send queries about EEE to EEE@UCI.EDU.

Filed Under: EEE Tagged With:

Digital Cellular Telephone Service

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NACS is pleased to announce a new digital cellular telephone service from Pacific Bell Mobile Services (PBMS). PBMS was recently awarded the California state contract for cellular service, with good service and pricing. NACS has established a relationship with Pacific Bell to provide convenient cellular service to the UCI community. PBMS’s digital Personal Communication Service (PCS) features good coverage throughout California, and has no roaming charges in California or Nevada. The service includes voicemail and numeric paging along with many other features. Several service plans and many equipment options are available for both UCI-paid (billed through NACS Electronic Communication Services) and employee-paid (personal) service.

For more information, see:

http://www.nacs.uci.edu/communication/cellular.html

Area Code Change on October 17th and UCI’s Modems

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As of Saturday, October 17, 1998, the new 949 area code must be used with UCI telephone numbers when dialing from outside the area; the 714 area code will no longer work. Among other things, the new area code will affect users of UCI’s dial-up modem pool.

If you are using a Macintosh computer, or Windows 3.x, and are dialing from within the 949 area code, no change is required. If you are using Windows 95/98, or are dialing in from a different area code, you must update the area code in your computer’s dial-up configuration. NACS has prepared a detailed document explaining how to do this, it is available on the web as follows:

http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/areacode.html

Vendor Technical Briefings at UCI

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NACS has recently sponsored several technical briefings by vendors who offer products and services intended for the educational community. NACS consulted campus support staff to narrow down which vendors and products were of interest, and then invited vendors to make campus presentations. The vendors were:

Nokia Display Products, who provided an overview and demonstration of Nokia monitors. Nokia is making a deliberate effort to increase its presence in the educational market by offering quality products at educational discounts.

Intel, who presented Video Conferencing products and outlined the “Intel CPU Roadmap,” Intel’s strategy for its family of processors.

Microsoft, who presented a technical overview of the new version of Windows NT about to be released (version 5.0 Beta 2) and described the strategic direction of Microsoft NT.

For detailed information about these presentations, please see NACS’ Computer Support Coordinator page:

http://www.nacs.uci.edu/support/csc

Suggestions about future vendor briefings are welcome, please contact Jan Vescera of NACS’ Indirect Support Team,JVescera@UCI.EDU.