End of Week One

After one week, NMS 210 students have gained some facility with XHTML and CSS layouts and styling. For each assignment, the students have been required to submit via our course management system (Moodle) and also all assignments have to be validated for both the HTML and CSS at w3.org.

One thing I want to cover next week is the principle of "inheritance" with CSS. I have noticed a lot of unnecessary and redundant code in the style sheets. Experimentation and troubleshooting a CSS page can be both rewarding and frustrating. The results, however, can leave a mess of useless code that should be cleaned up.

In the future, I want to develop some templates for common CSS techniques. For instance, many students wanted to include image switching or rollover effects without JavaScript. I think the background position changing technique works well but we ran into a few difficulties when trying to actually switch background images. We observed some odd differences in Firefox 2.0.3 and Safari for the Mac.

We will be forming the groups next week for the project phase of the class. There will be 4 groups and each group will develop a website. The Pine River contamination, the CAFO (Contained Animal Feeding Operation), campus security/emergency response, and the Great Lakes water supply will be the risk/crises topics addressed.

That's all for now.
rgr

First Day of Class

As we try and figure out how to use the blogging feature in Moodle, I thought it best to also keep this blog at blogger.com active.

We had our first meeting today and for the most part I think things went well. The COM 280 and NMS 210 students met as a group and reacted to the "risky" ideas for how the courses would be linked. Although I am sure we will learn some things as we go, there was general agreement that this "experiment" is well worth testing out.

On the technical end of things, we covered a basic introduction to web site organization, site management, Dreamweaver HTML authoring, and using web browsers for testing our sites. In particular, all the students now know how important it is to always test and test often. The Web Developer extensions for Firefox will come in very handy.

That's all for now.
rgr

First Post for NMS 210 Test Blog

I thought it might be interesting and fun to look more closely at blogging as I prepare for the spring term and NMS 210: Introduction to Digital Media. This year, the course is linked with Mike Vickery's class COM 280: Risk and Crisis Communication. I am excited to see some interesting projects develop as the students from both classes work together.

The NMS students will be getting a full dose of web and media design skills including HTML, CSS, JavaScript (mostly cut/paste), graphics, audio, video, and Flash objects, and in general exploring the challenges and methods to create media rich and engaging web content.

Should be fun!