I realize I’m about a year late to the conversation… But…. Can’t the IT guys at the school provide an alias that drops the tilde or just links through from the htdocs (or wherever their normal webdocs are located) to your home directory/public_html/? Surely they provide subdirectories for departments of the school and wouldn’t mind adding a symlink to your public_html from there….

Why don’t you just apply social darwinism? :-) If you can’t figure out what a tilde is, then drop out, now! I’m kidding though — I forget how much hand holding students need even at the college level.

@Gunni: Well the course I teach is a Gen Ed requirement so the student’s have no choice but to be there. So I typically have a few phys-ed majors, few dance majors and etc. And they all hate the subject (and all technology other than Facebook) with a passion really. :)

Fair enough on the tinyurl idea. :)

I’ll apologize in advance for the very Grinch-like attitude, but how about adopting the same “survival-of-the-fittest” way of thinking I assume most of your co-teachers have? If the kids can’t figure out where ~ is in a keyboard, then do they have that much business being in your class?

This isn’t coming from out of the blue. I’ve taught problem courses in 2nd year engineering maths, but I think this ~ problem roughly translates to students in those courses asking what a continuous function is. If you don’t know by now, then this is not the subject for you. Go do something you love.

@Rob: Heh, of course I would not use that one for the class. I was thinking more among the lines of “classname.dyndns.com” or “classname.mine.nu” or something like that.

Still, not the easiest to remember.

I can vouch for DynDNS. I use it to tunnel to a server I keep here at my house. Plus DD-WRT will auto update DynDNS which is pretty nice.

I’d go with a cheap .info domain. Yeah, you have to pay money for it, but isn’t $0.99 a year worth not having to say in front of your class “go to luke.kicks-ass.org”? That’s all fine and good to give to your friends or pass out on your website, but you might loose a little respect from your students.

Anyhow, just my two cents.

@Wikke: Heh, interesting! I guess the monkey thing is more universal than I thought. :P

@ Luke: That’s why I find it ridiculous. It’s wierd tha people are asking me for my email, they aren’t sure what @ is. :P

@ Wikke: LoL! @ sure does look like a super long monkey’s tail.

Hey, that ‘monkey’-thing exists also in Dutch.
Here, the ‘at’-symbol is more known as ‘apestaartje’. Which translates to ‘little monkey tail’ :-)

@Mart: Actually, I have yet to meet an email user who doesn’t know “at”. It is just such an essential part of the email culture – plus, you need an email to join facebook and invite friends there. so most of my students get that. :P

The only people who give me weird looks when I say “at” when spelling out an email are native Polish speakers. In Polish for some reason that character is commonly known as “małpa” which, btw translates to monkey. No clue why, but I commonly forget this and then have to answer awkward questions as to where does the monkey go in my email.

Back to English speakers though – most people are ok with colon and semi-colon. Undescore is easy to explain – “Shift Minus key”.

If you need ampersand you just say “the ‘and’symbol/key” and everyone will instantly know what you mean.

The difficult keys are tilde, vertical bar (pipe) and also forward/back slash (mostly because people are confused which one is which).