Supercourse Newsletter Jan - 20, 2001
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supercourse: http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/
Dear Friends;
We received some wonderful responses to the last newsletter. The most
poetic was:
The Supercourse group
I think the answer lies on the very fundamental nature of knowledge,
that is sharing. We love to share what we know. And by sharing, we
gain more knowledge.
And the beauty of sharing is we do not expect anything in return.
I think that is your message, written all over the soul of Super-
course.
Shita, Indonesia, Jan. 2001
We are gearing up for the upcoming year. The year 2000 was targeted
to the acquisition of lectures, and the distribution of the Super-
course through CDs and mirrored servers. More than 2000 faculty mem-
bers are on the Supercourse now. We are pleased with the success of
these. After the first shipment of the CD, we receive requests for
the CD everyday, and the number of requests is far more than we had
expected and can handle. To better serve those requests and others,
we will introduce a relational database this year. Ying Cai, a new
student who is skilled in databases, just joined us for this purpose.
We plan to have the next updated version of the archived file of the
Supercourse by the end of February. Those who installed the archived
file from the CD, those who set up the mirror server, and anyone else
can download this updated file freely from our site. We plan to de-
velop a system where it is easy to download slides and lectures into
PowerPoint. We also hope to begin the translation process. It is
likely that we will have certain countries responsible for this, and
they will maintain the translated web site. We would appreciate any
comments you might have to guide us.
For those who have not received the CD or it was defective, we are
planning to send the second shipment of the Supercourse CD at the end
of February. It has been great the response from all of you and we
will try to satisfy all the requests.
We plan to target Sept 1, 2001 to push forward on promoting utiliza-
tion. We would very much appreciate your suggestions as to how we can
promote the use of the website in training across the world.
The speed of joining the Supercourse is still accelerating. About 30
people a month are joining with us.
On Jan 31 Tom Songer and I (Ron) will teach Vint Cerf's lecture and
on Feb. 14, Jeff Koplan's lecture (Feb. 14) that are on the Super-
course. Vint is the Father of the Internet, and has been wonderful to
us. Jeff Koplan is the head of CDC and helped us to establish the CDC
page on the Supercourse. At the end of the lectures Vint and Jeff
will answer questions from our students via telephone. We would like
to invite you to review their lectures and then send in your own
questions which we can ask of them. We will then post these on at the
end of their lectures as these are the questions that the world would
like to know after seeing their lectures.
We think that this has the potential of not only having the global-
ization of lectures, but also the globalization of questions and an-
swers. The model could have Vint and Jeff teaching 20,000 students
world wide, and addressing their questions...a very cost effective
model. We think it will be a lot of fun, so please come join Vint,
Jeff, Tom and I.
We plan to send out an update CD next year, on it there will be the
first, American, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Russian rap song
titled "Teachen Prevention". We of course expect you all to join in
with singing (only kidding of course!).
Best Regards from Pittsburgh...Temperature -5 Celsius, a Grey day,
and we are ready for Spring
Ron, Akira, Benjamin, Eun Ryoung, Eugene, Beatriz, Ying, Fan, Faina,
Tom, Deb
mailto:super3@imap.pitt.edu
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