English 351, "Hypertext"
Spring 2006
MWF 2 -2:50
408 stv

Jim Kalmbach (kalmbach@ilstu.edu)
421H Stevenson 438-7648, home: 454-8017
http://www.ilstu.edu/~kalmbach
Office Hours: MWF 3-4 and by appointment.

Class web site: http://www.english.ilstu.edu/351/
Class blogging site: http://eng351.cas.ilstu.edu

Hypertext means nonlinear reading and writing whether in print or electronic form. While hypertext has a long history, it has come to be associated with creating web sites and involves issues of multimedia, navigation, code, and virtuality; and these things are the focus of our class. During the class you will create three major web sites and do a variety of reflective reading and responding. You will complete the class with a portfolio of very cool work.

 

Texts	Web sites	Click to Order
Williams, Robin and Tollett, John (2005). Non-Designer's Web Book 3nd Edition. Peach Pit Press. ISBN 0321193857 Be sure to get the third edition. It has significant improvements.	Robin Williams and John Tollett http://www.urlsinternetcafe.com/index.html http://www.ratz.com/ Book website
Krug, Steve. (2005). Don't Make Me Think. New Riders Press. ISBN 0321344758 Be sure to get the second edition.	Steve Krug
Lessig, Lawrence. (2005). Free Culture. New York: Penguin. ISBN 0143034650 Lessig is the founder of creative commons.	Lawrence Lessig
Zeldman, Jeffrey. (2003). Designing with Web Standards. Berkley, CA: New Riders Press. We will use this book in an examination of advanced design issues.	Jeffrey Zeldman Book Website
Warner, Janine and Gardner, Susannah. (2004). Teach Yourself Visually: Dreamweaver MX 2004. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. ISBN 0764543350. Recommended. The alamo has one copy. A good book. Past students have spoken highly of it.	Janine Warner Susannah Gardner Book website
I may assign additional web-based reading for specific units.

 

Software
We will use Dreamweaver MX 2004. This program has become the standard for serious web authoring. Dreamweaver is available in a variety of campus lab. More information is available here. If you have a copy of the newest version of Dreamweaver (8), by all means use it. Dreamweaver MX will also work but Dreamweaver 4.0 is problematic.

Course Requirements

• Attendance and Participation (10%)
  Attendance at all classes is required. Following English department policy, I will reduce your grade one level for each three classes that you miss. A vibrant underlife is essential to a class like this where people are immersed in learning new and difficult software. If you are having trouble with dreamweaver and stay home, then I can't help you; therefore, I expect you to come to all of the classes, even the work days.
  
• Responding to Readings, Posting Questions, and Blogging (10%)
  These are the three reading/writing activities that support the class:
  
  1. You will write a response to each of the assigned readings in the class. I expect that you will post these responses to your blog (so you can double count them), but I will accept responses in other forms, including email or in print. I am looking for responses that engage with the ideas in the text and not ones that summarize the reading or dismiss it (it was great or it sucked). You can also respond with a visual of some sort, uploaded to our blog.
  2. In addition to writing a response for each writing, you will write a set of discussion questions for one of the reading assignments for our theory book. I will assemble the questions into a handout and put you in small groups to talk about them. Your goal is to write questions that will stimulate discussion. Give the questions a good deal of thought, you do not want to get stuck in a boring discussion caused by your own questions. When you write discussion questions, those questions count as your response.
  3. You will each have a personal blog within the English 351 blogosphere. I am committing to blogging as a way of sharing information and reflecting on reading, on the process of creating your projects, and on the class. From week 2 to week 14 I expect you to write a minimum of 3 blog entries of week. To get full credit, I will expect you to have written at least 30 blog entries. Some weeks you may write less some more, that is ok. I am looking for engagement with the blog throughout the semester more than a specific count each week. Though your blogging will vary through the semester, in a typical week, you would do the following:
     
     • Write a response to one of the assigned readings.
     • Write an update about how you current project is progressing. What are you working on and what is giving your problems?
     • Response to a blog by another student or blog a comment about their website.

  Three times during the semester (these dates will be in the schedule, you will analyze how your are doing with your blog entries. In particular, I will ask you to count how many entries you have done in each category what you think of the entries, and if you have fallen behind, what your plans are for catching back up.

• Web Site Critiques (20%)
  You will write three critiques of web sites during the semester. Critical writing about web sites is essential to growth as a web designer. Each of these critiques should be about a web sites that is similar to the web project you are currently working on. See the web critique page for more information (reviews.html)
  
• Web Projects (60%)
  You will work on three major web projects during the semester and create a web portfolio at the end of the semester. Be creative in finding topics. Pick things that interest you and relate to the rest of your life. I am open to all sorts of ideas to web sites. I encourage you to take risks and I try to support risk taking by I give you time to revise (I won't grade the projects until the portfolio is turned in), by focusing on where you end up not where you begin, by helping you solve technical problems. The three project you will work on are:

Repurposing Starting with a print document that you have written, you will turn this document into a web site. In transforming one of your print texts for the web, you must think about how to best segment and link different parts of the text, what to keep and what to leave out. The project is all about reflecting on the relationship of print to web publishing. Your print document can be any genre: fiction/poetry/essay/technical writing/autobiography, etc. More information is available here and here.

As part of this project, you will write a reflection, telling me, why you choose your text, how you changed the text for the web, why you segmented the texts into individual pages in the manner that you did, and how in your view the web version is different from the print (whether better or worse). How does the web add to or take away from the experience of reading your document?

Identity You will create a web site that constructs some aspect of your identity. You will write a reflective essay about this project and about how it captures part of your identity. More information is available here and here.

Creation You will end the semester creating a major web on a topic of your choosing. My goal for this project is that you create something new. I would like it to be a project that enables you to think about new ways of writing on the web. We will negotiate the exact nature of this final project on an individual basis, as it is even more important to me that your final project advance your educational and career goals. Again you will write a reflection on this project.

Web Portfolio. You will create a simple web based portfolio displaying and contextualizing your work. I would like you to complete the first draft of your web portfolio by the end of the identity project. I will then use this portfolio to give you an tentative intermediate grade for the class so that you have some sense of how you are doing before you start the final project, and you will then update the portfolio with your final links. You do not need to write a reflection about the portfolio.

No later than a week after each of these projects is due, you will write a reflection about the project. As you will see when you visit this page, I ask you to write about what you tried to accomplish and what you liked and didn't like about the site. I want you to observe someone using your site and to identity what you would like to fix in the site for your portfolio. I have found that when student do a careful, thoughtful job of reflecting on their websites: telling me what they liked and what they didn't like, what they were trying to accomplish and why, I do a much better job of responding to the site and situating my comments in your concerns.

Graduate students will do an additional project of some sort that they construct in a manner that will advance their education and/or career goals. In general, projects fall into three groups: (1) a paper on a topic near to the student's interests, (2) an annotated bibliography of sources with a reflection on a topic that is important to the students career goals, and (3) additional web project to beef up your portfolio. Some graduate students have combined their paper and final project, writing a reflective essay about the project. See gradpapers.html for more info.

The Project Process
For each of the three web site projects, we will work through a 4-6 week process:

Project plan You write a simple plan for each project, telling me what you want to do for your project, why you want to do it, what a typical page will look like and what pages you plan to include. Beginning web designers all need to plan more than they think they do so I am going to be very hard nosed about forcing you to develop plans for your projects. If you have a plan, and you get stuck on something, you can set it aside and work on other parts of the site. The more of a site you complete, the easier the rest of it gets to complete the rest of the site. When you do not have a plan and get stuck, you have nowhere to go and just get more and more frustrated. Having a plan does not mean you have to follow it slavishly. Part of being a good web designer is recognizing a better idea when it comes along and changing your plans as your site evolves.

Prototype I am a big believer in getting something up on the web quickly, getting feedback, refining the design and then gradually adding content and links. Act fast, test, and refine. A project prototype is a single page that shows off your design plan, your main categories of links (called information architecture), and your navigational scheme. When you create a prototype, it is much easier to get feedback and make changes because you only have to revise one page.

Preview This is the hardest week in the process. A preview draft of a web site has drafts of all or most of the pages done. It is a rough draft of the entire site and a major milestone. Your peer response team should work through each page of your site and click on each link.

Rollout You are ready to go public, rolling out version 1 of your site. T-shirts all around. It is time to move on to the next project. At this point, I will go back and do a formal evaluation and send you an email about the site. Although it is time to move on, you can continue to make changes to the site you just completed until the end of the semester, and I will try to provide you with clear feedback about what things need to be changed and what issues you need to think about in your next site. In general you will want to correct small problems that make you look bad and leave the big issues for your next project.

Reflection After you have rolled out the project, observe someone using your site and write a reflection about the process. See reflect.html for more information.

Notes on Grading
I do not grade your major web projects because my experience has been that student can make truly remarkable leaps in quality from the first to the third project and it is those leaps that most interest me. I am interested in where you end up in this class, not where you begin. Of course some students come into class already knowing how to produce good websites and for those students, three quality web projects will also meet this requirement, but even then I am most interested in the quality of your final project.

To get an A in this class, I expect you to attend, to write the responses to the readings, to keep up your class blog, to write strong, clear critiques, and to make steady progress in the quality of your sites over the course of the semester so that your final project is strong engaging work. I expect, by the end of the class, that you have tested your sites thoroughly and that all the links work, all the images are in place, all of the documents have titles, and you have spell checked and copyedited your pages.

Student usually get a B in this class for a combination of four reasons: (1) They produce more modest websites. These web sites show some growth between sites, but they tend to be very similar to one another. The student is not taking many risks or trying new things. (2) They do some of the written work in the class, not all, failing to write some of the critiques, the reading responses or the blogs. (3) They neglect to edit and test their sites carefully and as a result their final portfolio and web pages have a number of minor flaws: broken links, missing images, no page titles, etc. 4. They skip more than three classes.

Students usually get a C because they produce minimally acceptable sites that show very little or no growth from site to site, they skip a significant number of classes, and they seriously neglect the written critical, work of the class.

Students who get Ds and Fs fail to do one or more of the major projects in the class and miss massive amounts of class.