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Here's an article from the LA Times (1/22/06) on the new travel ID and on getting a passport. Act now -- your passport is good for 10 years and you'll need it before getting a visa.

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Click on the icon below to open a general travel planning checklist from the LA Times. Among the items to note are those involving passports, visas, medications, and the like.

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Thanks, Louis for the wonderful recommendations. I hope others finding useful image sites will share them. And, thanks, as well for offering up student assistant help.

Students are a terrific resource. I'd have them collect images, keeping a notefile listing the web source and providing details about the image. Otherwise, mistakes will be made (putting a temple in the wrong city or country....).

For basic images from Asia, the Corel disks are quite good (once about $75, they are now available for about $6 on Ebay and elsewhere). These are professional images (I used some on the Japanese geography website) and would be good for use on assignment pages and so forth.

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Hi Folks,
As noted via email, we'll cancel the Jan. 30 session and meet on Feb. 6 (3:30-6:30) instead. Morgan Pitelka will speak on women in EA history. See the readings and bibliography in the women thread in this forum.

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Hi Folks,
You have a print copy of this, but some may find it useful to have a "clickable" version as well. Some may wish to share this with their students.

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Your disk has a newer version of the software than what I described in the “Using Composer” guide. The changes in the software are not significant, but one may cause some trouble.

You need to install either the Mozilla or Netscape _SUITE_. Simply having the Netscape browser (called Navigator) is not enough.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Insert the cd into your cd drive.

2. Some computers will display the contents of the cd automatically, for others you’ll need to use My Computer (Windows) or Finder (Mac). Once you’ve got the contents displayed, click on the appropriate folder (either mac or windows).

3. You’ll see a Mozilla file (labels/numbers differ, but they start with Mozilla). Click on it to launch the installation of Mozilla.

4. Follow the installation directions provided by the program. You need to install the Suite, though you won’t use mail and some other components.

5. After installing Mozilla (you may need to restart your computer), start the program by clicking on your desktop icon or using:

Windows computers: START => All Programs => Mozilla
Macs: Macintosh HD => Applications => Mozilla

6. By default, the program opens with the Mozilla web browser, which is called Mozilla Navigator (yes, just like Netscape). On the menu bar at the top of the window, find WINDOW. Click on it to see the different components of the Mozilla Suite. Click on Composer to open your web page editor.

You’ll find that Composer looks and works very much like a word processor. The Using Composer guide should help you as you experiment with building your web page.

*********
f you run into installation problems, you may wish to download the latest version of Mozilla to your computer. This takes some time as the download file is more than 10 mb in size. Over a fast connection, it will take a few minutes.

Go to http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/

At this site you can also download guides to using the software.

Here's the official Mozilla guide:
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/guide/get-started.html

Most people will find it quicker to install the software from the provided cd-rom.

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e've suggested cd-roms from Corel and other resources. Here are a couple of websites to visit:

Image After
http://www.imageafter.com/

Image After offers free and paid images and textures. The assortment is huge, but there isn't much on Asia. Some backgrounds, etc. may be useful.

UNESCO Photobank

Currently being reconstructed -- relaunch is overdue
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=20289&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Excellent tips and links from the library at the University of San Francisco (note the sage copyright advice!):
http://www.lib.usf.edu/ref/ifrank/guides/images.html

Personal websites are a potential source (e.g., Flicker.com and others). Write to the photographer and explain your intentions and pledge credit and see what happens.

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Here are some sites that provide web page templates that you can adapt. None of these are especially complicated and you could readily match them using Mozilla Composer.

San Diego State University (< 10, simple and effective)
http://webquest.sdsu.edu/LessonTemplate.html

Netscape (> 10 templates, very basic)
http://wp.netscape.com/browsers/templates/

Web Diner (< 10 templates)
http://www.webdiner.com/templates/webtemp.htm

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On a page on the Univ. of Kansas math dept. website, you can access commonly needed icons such as
http://www.math.ku.edu/icons/back.gif

http://www.math.ku.edu/icons/

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I've set up a page for us to draw upon as we begin:

http://international.ucla.edu/asia/ncta/utla/web-workshop.asp

Web Page naming conventions

Give files simple names, without spaces. Do this for web pages and for images. For example:

assignments.html; reading1.html; calligraphy.jpg

Name your homepage -- this will make your web address shorter.

For example:
http:/www.asia.ucla.edu/lessons/jluesse/

http://www.asia.ucla.edu/lessons/fwiley/

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Hi Folks,

I have long appreciated the creative English one finds on t-shirts, shop signs, and elsewhere in Asia. Finally, there's a website devoted to abuse of Chinese characters: Hanzi Smatter. Point your browser at:

http://hanzismatter.com/

The site features photos of no doubt hard earned tattoos with characters misused or miswritten.

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Hi Reza,

Since no one else commented, I thought I should -- Mozilla is the organization that produces both browsers. They are different products. Mozilla is a suite (email, browser, and web composer) whereas Firefox is the best and fastest browser available. For details:

http://www.mozilla.org

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Wikipedia is created by users. Potentially having multiple authors/editors means that individual articles could be amazingly strong and complete or skimpy or, worse yet, plenty of questionable information.

Some college faculty, eager to steer students to resources they have more confidence in, refuse to permit students to cite Wikipedia. Below are links to articles discussing Wikipedia's virtues and shortcomings.

Peter Matanle, Japan scholor and AsiaMedia commentator

There is no doubt where the creators of "Wikipedia: A Techno-Cult of Ignorance" stand. The authors see Wikipedia as "the migration of the old left into the field of cyber-information."

Charles Allen, librarian at East Tennessee State University has written about the resource's reliability in "Wikipedia: All-Volunteer Instant Encyclopedia".

The journal Nature recently evaluated Wikipedia. The article requires access through a paid portal. Here are some snippets:

"However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.

"The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three."

...
"Wikipedia is growing fast. The encyclopaedia has added 3.7 million articles in 200 languages since it was founded in 2001. The English version has more than 45,000 registered users, and added about 1,500 new articles every day of October 2005. Wikipedia has become the 37th most visited website, according to Alexa, a web ranking service.

"But critics have raised concerns about the site's increasing influence, questioning whether multiple, unpaid editors can match paid professionals for accuracy. Writing in the online magazine TCS last year, former Britannica editor Robert McHenry declared one Wikipedia entry — on US founding father Alexander Hamilton — as "what might be expected of a high-school student". Opening up the editing process to all, regardless of expertise, means that reliability can never be ensured, he concluded.

"Yet Nature's investigation suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries. In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team.

"Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively."

[Jim Giles, "Internet encyclopedias go head to head," Nature 438, 900-901 (15 December 2005).]

A last word (at least for this post) on Wikipedia. Look at any entry in the encyclopedia (say,
Chiang Kai-shek). Often the entry will be amazingly detailed and offer names/terms in languages other than English (very handy in this instance are the characters for these). It will include links to other entries, photos, a bibliography of print resources, and links to other web resources. Pretty typical for a reference work, many might observe.

That's when Wikipedia offers something rather distinct. At the top of every entry is a "history" tab. Click on it to see a list of changes that the article has undergone. You can choose to compare one revision with another side by side. Many revisions fix typos or other errors, but others are substantive, dealing with how an event or action is characterized. Students might profit from spending time looking at and discussing this "production of history", this writing of history.

It would be great if forum participants would look at and comment on Wikipedia's coverage of a topic they know well.

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Thanks, Reza, for the form and Therese for your question. The most helpful website reviews discuss a site's contents, its ease of use, and its advantages and weaknesses for teachers and students. In the case of general interest websites, we appreciate discussion of the ASIAN portions of it. For example, the Library of Congress and Smithsonian websites are outstanding, clearly essential for many subjects, especially US history, but are not particularly strong on Asia (except for US efforts in the Philippines, for example).

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Hi Folks,

A couple of years ago, we had Lynne make a formal presentation, "Genji in Graphic Detail", at UCLA. You can read about it at:

http://international.ucla.edu/asia/article.asp?parentid=10674

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