I never knew this, and it’s pretty cool:
If you browse to http://www.illinois.edu/~[your netID here], it will forward to the website that you have listed in the UIUC Campus Phonebook (modify your entry on the Electronic Directory Editor). For example, you can get to CS Professor Lenny Pitt’s page by going to http://www.illinois.edu/~pitt Pretty cool!
The University of Illinois Office of Admissions has recently started creating some really cool marketing materials featuring the University of Illinois. Here is one example video:
If you’re like many students at the University of Illinois, you have to keep track of many websites for all your classes. This can get confusing, but there are ways to keep the mess organized.
Organize Classes in Bookmarks Toolbar
I like to keep all of my class websites organized into folders in my Bookmarks Toolbar (Firefox) or Links Menu (Internet Explorer). I make a folder called UIUC Classes in my Bookmarks Toolbar, and create folders for each class in this folder. In each class’s folder, I place all the bookmarks that I will need for that class – from the official class website, to Illinois Compass for my grades, to the TA’s personal webspace where she posts the answers to homeworks. Having all this information in one place is very convenient, and enables me to never forget anything, because all of the websites are right there.
Wikihow: How to organize bookmarks in Firefox
Firefox Keywords
Keywords are a great way to get to your class websites even quicker than going through the “Links” toolbar. In Firefox, if you right-click on any existing bookmark and click Properties, you will see an input box named Keyword. The Keyword of a bookmark is an alias or nickname for that bookmark, where when typed in the address bar, Firefox will automatically load that bookmark.
For example, for my Physics 212 class, I set up a bookmark to the class website. Then I right-clicked on the bookmark and hit properties. I set up 212 as my Keyword for that class. Now, whenever I type 212 in the address bar and hit Enter, the Physics 212 website automatically is loaded. This method of bringing up classes is very, very quick – allowing more time for homework.
More Information on Firefox Keywords
Today I learned about U of I Wiki – the University of Illinois Wiki. This is not a University sanctioned site, and it’s simply an instance of MediaWiki, the open source software package that was originally written for Wikipedia.
At first, I thought that a University of Illinois Wiki is too much. Why don’t we just put the information in Wikipedia, which is already an established and popular wiki site?
After looking through the site, however, I think this may have potential. This is exactly what the commercial website Wikia is doing – making Wikipedia-like sites for individual subjects (one of the most popular wikis on Wikia is the Muppet Wiki, with over 15,558 articles).
I still don’t like the fact that it’s hosted by a single, private person, though, however good his intentions may be. What if he forgets to pay the hosting bill one year, for example? All of the data in the U of I Wiki will be lost. I would definitely feel better if it was hosted by the University or even Wikia.
Overall, though, the U of I Wiki is useful. A decent amount of people will find the information on the U of I Wiki useful, and if it eases the search of just a few people, it is worth it.
Edit: apparently this site is serving up Google AdSense Ads. This makes me very skeptical of the true motivation behind the site. Maybe we should all just keep updating Wikipedia; it actually has a lot of information about the University.
It’s that time of year. Class registration for Spring 2008 classes is in full swing at the University of Illinois.
Class registration is done through “UI-Integrate Self-Service.” It is also called “Banner” or “Enterprise” by some. All these names refer to the same online system, located at https://ui-integrate.apps.uillinois.edu. You can get to this website many ways, and most people have their own unique way of getting there (the link on the Course Catalog site, for example).
The time at which you are allowed to register is called your time ticket. Your time ticket is determined by your class as well as if you are in select groups (James Scholars, marching band members, and varsity athletes get to register before everyone else). To see your exact time ticket, log in to UI-Integrate Self-Service, but to see the generalized groups, there is a list on the Office of Records website.
Choosing your classes is normally easy. All majors have a flow chart of classes that are suggested each semester. This chart can be found at the bottom of the description of your major on the UIUC Course Catalog. If you need to choose some GenEd courses, you can follow the links on the Course Catalog and choose a class that is interesting.
Getting your classes into a schedule that you approve of can be more difficult. There are a few online services that allow you to choose your classes easily. The service I like the most is IlliNexus Schedule Planner. Using this tool, you can input your classes, and then turn classes on and off to easily see when the classes fall each week. After you choose your perfect schedule in IlliNexus, you can sign up for those classes with the click on a button at the bottom of the screen. Beware – some of the classes could be filled, and when you sign up for all the classes in your perfect schedule, they will all be added except for one or two of the classes that are full. This really ruins your schedule, so if you’re signing up for a class that could potentially be full, you should check the status of the capacity by logging into UI-Integrate and looking up the course. This will show you how many spaces are taken and remaining in each class.
Another online class schedule service is Scheedule. Scheedule is developed by the UIUC chapter of ACM, and is very good. Scheedule gives you all the different options of class combinations by scrolling through them. You can also specify your class preferences, like your favorite times of day, or clustered/spread out classes. Scheedule is also a very good scheduling tool.
So that is basically the process. If you like a lot of control over your schedule, I’d recommend IlliNexus Schedule Planner; but if you are lazy and just want a schedule that works, Scheedule will give you the best option without much thinking required by you.
Do you have other ways of scheduling your classes? Let us know in the comments. Happy Scheduling!
University of Illinois CS alumnus Max Levchin is profiled in an article on the New York Times.
Mr. Levchin, who is now 32, is typical of a new generation of junior titans in Silicon Valley who might be called the prematurely rich — techies worth tens of millions of dollars, sometimes more, at an age when many others are just starting to figure out what to do with their lives.
New York Times: After Succeeding, Young Tycoons Try, Try Again
I came across an interesting corner of YouTube yesterday. Apparently the Office of Admissions at the University of Illinois has been putting up videos on YouTube. Some of them are very good, but some are pretty bad. You can see a list of all of them on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/IllinoisAdmissions
So Firefox is releasing a “Campus Edition.” This is a firefox install that is “pre-bundled with student-centric extensions like Zotero, FoxyTunes and StumbleUpon.” As a college student, I would never download the Firefox Campus Edition because I simply don’t use those extensions. Do college students actually use these, or is this a bad stereotype of college students? I’m afraid it may be the latter.
We previously reported that Facebook is shutting down its “Courses” feature. They have indeed done that, and have posted a blog post recommending replacements:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=4314497130
I am personally using the Courses app that they suggest. One of the main reasons to use Facebook is to find classmates to study with. Hopefully the new Courses won’t divide everyone up, and will add more functionality to a really useful application.
Although the details are vague, Campus Technology reports that Blackboard, the maker of the Blackboard Learning System – the system that is referred to as Illinois Compass at U of I, has released Anti-Plagiarism technology for their products. The technology has been around for awhile in other products, but has never been incorporated into a large classroom learning system like the Blackboard Learning System (Illinois Compass).
If incorporated into Illinois Compass, instructors could potentially require paper submissions through Illinois Compass and the system would automatically compare the paper to databases of published papers, internet sources, and past papers submitted under the anti-plagiarism system.
There are no reports yet, however, if the new Illinois Compass has these features installed. The online Illinois Compass documentation does not mention it, but as this is a feature release by Blackboard, UIUC CITES Educational Technologies may have not even known of the feature until now.
