                                HOLIDAYS IN HELL

    Objective: Combine internet pages into a single summary.
    Introduction: (5 Minutes)

    Blackboard, Flip charts, Project web pages etc.

    Review files and folders on a computer system. Show there are
several different ways of viewing files.  Explain that most of the time
the interface deceives. The file names are not really as displayed in the
windows. The only truthful record is using the DOS window and typing
'dir'. Show how the windows software sometimes capitalises names.

    The computer shows you what the vendor wants you to see and nothing
else. Don't trust anything you see there.

    Explain the file types by extension.

    This stuff is important, because these things are labels for
documents on the world wide web, besides the computer system you happen
to be using now.

    .asp        Active server process (mainly peerl, can be C#)
    .avi        Video format
    .bas        Basic program text
    .c          C language source
    .dat        Some sort of data. Explorer cache file index.
    .doc        Word document, or plain text
    .dll        Dynamically linked library
    .exe        DOS/WINDOWS file.
    .gif        Graphic image format
    .gz         Public domain compress
    .h          C language include file
    .htm        'html' For straight DOS
    .html       Hypertext markup language
    .jav        Java script
    .jpg        Joint picture group
    .lnk        Link
    .mpg        Motion picture group
    .pbm        Portable bit map
    .pdf        Portable document format. It's not really portable.
    .pif        Program interface file.
    .pl         Perl (Pathologically Eclectic Rubish Lister)
    .rtf        Rich text format
    .so         Shared object. Like .dll
    .tar        Let them eat tar
    .tgz        Industry standard cpmpressed archive
    .tiff       Tagged image format
    .tmp        temporary file. Safe to delete these.
    .txt        plain text
    .vb         Visual basic
    .xbm        X bit map
    .zip        Compressed and bundled files


    See more on Apeche configuration files.

    HANDOUT: HOLIDAYS IN HELL

    Find a list of cheap hotels in a designated city, using INTERNET
search engines and any other resources such as their newspapers which
they have brought to the lesson. By the end of the assignment the
learners will know how to view their knowledge base of the city visited
by the virtual tourist.

    Besides a list of cheap or budget hotels, the learner should have
answers to various questions.

    (1) What is the human rights record of the country to be visited.
        Look at an Amnesty site for example.

    (2) How likely is it that you will fall ill there ? Is the water
        safe to drink. Do you think you need vaccinations ?

    Produce a summarised document for your town. It should include a
list of cheap hotels and useful warnings on health and safety, with
particular regard to local laws and the human rights record of the
country's police apparatus.

    Do not exceed fifty lines. Lists of common diseases for a particular
locality will attract praise, as will any other interesting social
statistics such as women's enrolment in Science & Engineering courses,
literacy rates etc.

    _ files greater than 10 Kilobytes will be chopped to that size _.

                            PRIVACY TALK
    Users are settling at their computers.

    The documents are marked by an ID for a while, during any teacher
validation, but later on these ID numbers are removed, by a program,
and the documents put in a more public domain, or tarred and compressed
and backed up. Learners must set out a personal policy on whether they
want their work to be deleted, or stored for their future interests.

    If learners want their work stored, then they should be able to
specify whether it is encrypted, using current assumed best practice.
The institution must be able to set quotas on the maximum amount stored
per student, and the administrator of the system should be able to take
steps such as the automatic loss of passwords if accounts are not used
at all during a certain period of time.

    Learners who wish to assert their moral rights will be given the
chance to do so. They just include their name somewhere in the
document.
                        LOGGING ON
   (10 Minutes)

    Class move to computer terminals. I explain the privacy policy as
outlined above. This will take up to twenty minutes, but expect ten. At
this time each learner is given a list of two possible towns for their
holiday. These will be randomly drawn. The name of the output file is
also given to each learner at this stage.

                SESSION LOGS

    The learners save a few pages of text, and merge parts of them into
a single file. This should contain a sorted list of hotels, followed by
some interesting facts about the city such as the prevelence of AIDS,
TB, Malaria and Meningitis.

                PREPARING SPACE

    Each user creates a folder for temporary files, and remembers it's
name. This is where 'Save As' files will go. It may also be useful to
start up an editor such  'notepad', 'vi', 'Word', or any freeware
editor downloaded during a previous session. This editor window is
where the document is to be prepared.

        Example: vi p1123-jakarta.txt

                USING THE WEB BROWSER
    (20 Minutes)

    Turn on the web browser.
    Check for a status line, giving the full URL.

    The learners can start looking for websites using either search
engines or government websites such as tourist authorities, CIA
factbook, US consular information or even word of mouth in the class.

    Example:

  netscape http://www.googlebot.com/search?q=cheap%20hotels%20jakarta &

                SAVING FILES
    If a web document is really interesting, try and find out if it is
html or plaintext. Users may either use 'Cut and Paste' or Save As.
Older documents are generally more portable. Learners will do this at
different rates. Some will have difficulty because they have no idea
what they are doing, while others will get their screens bombarded with
high paced advertising for all the attractions and vices of a city.
Pity the poor learner who draws 'Las-Vegas'.

    Try and save one file with hotels (a1.tmp) and another with public
health (a2.tmp).

              MERGING THE FILES
   (15 Minutes)

    Two or more files are to be merged using whatever method is most
comfortable for the learner. Some prefer to assemble the documents
with cut and paste, while others may prefer more tried and tested
methods such as editors.

    vi p1123-jakarta.txt
    :r a1.tmp
    G
    :r a2.tmp

    Now delete lines and rearrange the file.
    :x!

    During this time the instructor gets computer windows on one
of the machines and looks at the contents of the directory
/home/Public/holiday. The instructor will be prepared to use
searching and frequency count techniques to view the assignments.
At this stage some of the users will have saved their data in
propriety formats such as WORD. That's no problem. There is
still time left.

        COLLATING THE RESULTS
    (5 Minutes)
    Each learner posts their document to a specified place.
    Example: cp p1123-jakarta.txt /home/Public/holiday

    Once the class members finish the assignment, or even during the
assignment, they send the fact sheet to a directory in a simple
plaintext format suitable for an ftp archive.

    If the learners are in groups, then some sort of collaboration may
be allowed. For example one person in the group could go in for
compiling a medical or human rights record for a whole list of cities
from just one website.

    If some learners do not speak english, that is all the better. They
can compile their fact sheets in their own language. Validation by the
other learners may not be so easy, but the excercise can be put into
the public domain for evaluation by a native speaking teaching
assistant, who has internet access somewhere.

                      SUMMARY
    (5 Minutes)
    Now the learners know how hard it may be to assemble material
from different sources. Different people work at different speeds
at this sort of thing. Literacy is an advantage for producing
abstracts, but manual dexterity can be great for producing a high
volume of documentation.

    Quality and not quantity is important.

    This may seem far fetched material teach to learners in deprived
areas of the UK but school children can do this sort of thing. Many of
them have indeed set up big money making commercial websites by
collecting information. In the case of adult education its a tough case
of getting adults to learn from the children.

    Tony Goddard, Sheffield 2003
    Info: +44 (0)7944 764312  tony@lowtech.org
    http://d4maths.lowtech.org/mirage








