Settle in at Cafe MOOlano

A creative Berkeley site dubbed Cafe MOOlano, http://www-moolano.berkeley.edu/, offers "an online meeting space for Berkeley instructors and students."

"MOO" stands for a multi-user domain (known as a MUD), which is object oriented. MOOs operate through online "rooms" in which multiple users can communicate.

The Cafe MOOlano site explains how to get connected to the Berkeley MOO and encourages innovative uses like online instructor office hours.

UC Looks Ahead

In March, an all-UC conference will be held at UCLA for "an intensive consideration of the possibilities and challenges" of new learning and teaching technologies.

The conference, March 25 and 26, will bring together invited faculty and others from throughout UC.

Among those coordinating the conference are three Berkeleyans, Professor Alice Agogino, of mechanical engineering, aagogino@euler.berkeley.edu; Mark Kaiser, director of the Language Media Center, mkaiser@violet.berkeley.edu; and Professor Randy Katz, of computer science, randy@cs.berkeley.edu.

The conference's web site is http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/auc/.

A Tale of Two Servers

Socrates and Amber. A philosopher and the gooey material that provided inspiration for Jurassic Park, right? Yes, but they are also the names of two power computer services on which campus departments run their Web pages.

Amber is the server for administrative web sites such as the campus's new WWW home page, the schedule of classes, and job listings.

Socrates is the new general purpose system for academic computing. It replaces Garnet and Violet and is expected to run web pages for courses and research projects.

The servers are managed by Information Systems and Technology's central computing services.