Moving a Large Scale University to Unicode

1. Moving a Large Scale University to Unicode Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D. Teaching and Learning with Technology Penn State University ejp10@psu.edu

2. Outline • About the Penn State Audience • Just-in-Time vs. Full Unicode Training • Working with the Computer Labs • Penn State Web Resources • Some i18n Tech Cases • Discussion

3. Penn State • Land-grant, state-supported • Twenty plus campuses • University Park: 40,000+ Students • Majority of students from Pennsylvania (many from rural Pennsylvania) • Strong in many disciplines, particularly sciences and engineering

4. Multiple Audiences • Students & Staff from Pennsylvania & U.S. • Students & Staff from outside U.S. • Technology Support (many monolingual) • Instructors (foreign language, science)

5. Audience Needs Blank = wide variation

6. How this Started... • Linguistics Ph.D. working as instructional technologist • Assigned to Spanish online course project in 2000 • Assigned to Penn State Technology in Language Learning project in 2001

7. Year 2000 Approach • Explain principles of Unicode • Give details for • Accents (Western Europe) • East Asian Languages • Provide Links for other cases • Web Site & Seminar

8. Problems • Low attendance of all Unicode seminars • Most users cannot connect Unicode principles with implementation • “Each language has its own story” • Each software application also has its own story

9. Modified Approach: Web • Explain each language set up individually • Links to general resources on accent codes, keyboard setup, etc. • Links to Web development tips (including original encoding tutorial) • Adding software specific pages (e.g. Adobe Connect) • http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international

10. Modified Approach: Other • Maintain contact with foreign language instructors • Document foreign language utilities for tools as needed (e.g. course management system) • Informal group acts as clearing house for many foreign language tech issues

11. Computer Lab Utilities • Fonts • TITUS Cyberbit (covers many scripts) • Doulos SIL (phonetic symbols) • Special Keyboards • Russian Phonetic KeyboardsASDF (Win) / Northwestern (Mac) • Phonetic Symbol KeyboardsUCL (Win) / SIL (Mac)

12. More Lab Utilities • Global Writer (Win)Recommended by Comp. Lit. • East Asian Utilities (Win)Students must activate the Windows East Asian Utilities in Start Menu in their Penn State Windows Profile in order to access them in Control Panel • Others - Need to allow one semester to install and test utilities

13. Profiles in Lab • Windows users need to activate utilities once in their profile and they remain active each time they log in. • Macintosh users need to activate utilities each time they log in to lab (no roaming profiles), but all languages visible.

14. International Web Site http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international • One main editor • Updated at least once per year • New browsers • New operating systems • New languages • Actual testing whenever possible

15. Web Site Usage: On Campus • Windows Alt Codes (280+ hits in Sep 07) • Spanish (280+ hits in Sep 07)Spanish/Accent Codes often top TLT search • French/German/Chinese/Arabic • Hits for ca. 8-10 non-PSU taught languagesSome may be learning Web development • RSS News Page (140+ hits)

16. Web Site Usage: Non-PSU • Off campus & non-Penn State visitors • Popular Topics • Windows Alt Codes (120,000+ hits/ month) • HTML Entity Codes • French, Spanish, Old English, German, PhoneticsChinese, Japanese, Korean • Math Symbols • Windows Keyboard Setup • Mac Extended Keyboard Accent Codes • Firefox Setup • HTML Entity Codes, Metatags, RTL Alignment, CSS, Encoding

17. i18n Tech: French PHP Quiz Lessons Learned • PHP Standard tool for Penn State, but UTF support weak until recent versions. • Programmer had glitches with œ (O+E) because it is technically outside Latin-1. • Had to resolve Mac vs. Windows text entry.

18. Creating Indic Language Web Pages Problem • Students from India taking courses in Web development at Penn State • Instructor wanted resources to allow development of native language sites Solution • Addition of Indic script pages to Web site

19. i18n Tech: Math Symbols in Flash Quiz Lessons Learned • No entity codes allowed in XML or text files • Need text editor which recognizes UTF files • Byte Order may matter in older versions of Flash • CSS should specify Arial Unicode for Windows

20. Teaching Students to Type Arabic • Global Writer preferred to other word processors because of usability. • Limited licenses for Global Writers (5 concurrent uses) made demo a challenge. • Instructor felt students should learn handwriting, so was not sure how she would implement in the future.

21. Chinese Course in Adobe Acrobat Connect • Adobe Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze) a synchronous collaboration tool. • Includes “Note Pod” for messages & “Chat Pod” • Instructor will need to activate keyboard to use Chinese. • Mac users need to cut and paste from Text Edit into pods in Acrobat Connect.

22. Spanish Quiz in Course Managment System • Many vendors still use ISO-8859-1 as a Web page encoding (without the meta tag) Problematic for browsers set to UTF-8. • Mac input not always recognized. • Quizzes in non Western European languages may not work as expected

23. General Lessons Learned • Just-in-time is the key. • Don’t forget the math symbols...or the em-dash (—). • Every project has its own kinks. The key is to document them somewhere. • People are excited to learn this...once they realize they need it.