Week 9: Lessons Learned

My project website is here.

I considered the Web to be a useful tool for teaching before I took this course, and my opinion has changed only in that I have found a number of additional ways to make it useful.
1) I will probably try to put together a course syllabus for each of my classes that I teach and put them on-line.
2) I also plan to include reference links to the files that students need to use and to extra reference material.
3) As a rule, high school students really like to blog. Unfortunately, my school systems' networks have horribly limited access to the outside world, deliberately imposed and controlled yb our ISP. So I don't see myself incorporating anything there...

As for what others think, see Todd's site and Danny's site.

Week 8: Learning through doing

At this point, I am convinced that there is no HTML editor out there that gets it right all of the time. I agree that What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWIG) editors such as MS Front Page and Macromedia Dreamweaver allow you to create a lot more code more efficiently that you would be able to do if you were just hand-coding. BUT - the cose they create isn't always correct or the most efficient code possible.

The most common place where I find that HTML generaters fail is in the creation of links. I usually want to use a relative link - something like "myfile.html" - which means that the file targeted by a link set up that way will simply look in the same directory as the file containing the link. HTML editors frequently use absolute links - such as "/websitecode/thissite/myfile.html". This becomes a problem when you relocate the code - you have to go into the code and change all of the absolute links.

The tables created by HTML generators are frequently a bit more complex than they really need to be.

Also, style elements are usally coded "in-line" by code gemerators, rather than using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to easily provide a consistant easily-modifiable style for the entire site.

The moral of the story is TEST TEST TEST - try out the code on your development system, then try it out again on the sserver where it will be permanently hosted. Be ready to re-code some code sections by hand if necessary to produce more effective code.

Week 7: Video

I like movies, and consider it handy to be able to see the trailers of films that I am thinking about seeing before I actually go to the theater. For this reason, I like Yahoo's movie preview section.

Apple Computer puts its TV ads on their web site, thus allowing them to do double duty as Internet content and TV ad. They are acctually pretty informative and funny. I love the way their computer ads slam Microsoft - like the best satire, they aare deadly accurate in revealing the weakness of PC spoducts compared to the Macintish.

The Microsoft Network (MSN) also makes effective uses of video - their "video headlines" on the main page of their site encourage the user to browse and stay on site - a prime goal for any commercial site.

Week 6:Podcaster

I looked at some podcasting sites, but I don't think I successfully subscribed to anything.

Week 5: Delicious

I found del.icio.us and set up an account. I located several good professional links and put them into it. See below for a link.

Week 4: Fair Use and Friends

What is fair use?

When in doubt, start with the law. In this case, that would be According to Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code, Circular 92, starting with Chapter 1, Section 107, which you can view here. The gist of the matter is that portions of copyrighted works can be legally reproduced in several cases:

• If someone wishes to discuss or criticize some portion of the work, it is legal to reproduce portions of it so long as they are properly credited.
• Education workers tend to have fairly wide discretion to create and distribute copies of copyrighted materials for educational purposes.
• The amount of material reproduced and the profit/non-profit status of the entity doing the reproducing are taken into account.

What is creative commons licensing?

Per the official website for Creative Commons Licensing (CCL), CCL is an attempt to find a happy medium between full-fledged copyright protection (all rights are reserved by the creator) and public domain (the creator retains no protection against any other party making use of his creation for any and all purposes). For works protected by a CCL agreement, the creator retains the same rights that he would have for his works under copyright law, but he can specify accepted uses for his creation which are looser applications of normal copyright law. For example, an artist may specify that it is acceptable for anyone to use images from his web site on for-profit web sites as long as the image is credited to him. Some specific variants are discussed here.

In my Links section, you will find a number of interesting sites containing CCL or public domain images.

Week 3: My web site project

I am planning to implement a wedding site for my daughter, who plans to marry on August 18 of this year. I anticipate that I will include these pages:

• Main/splash page
• Family page - short bios of the bride and groom and whoever else gives me postable information
• Itinerary for the wedding day
• Directions
• An RSVP page capable of generating e-mail
  
• A page with links to the stores with which the couple has registered
• A links page including links to the various service vendors involved in the wedding

I plan to use the RoadRunner account that I am already paying for to host the site. I am still trying to find out what technical features they support. I talked to the RR help desk, and the rep seems to believe that Javascript and PHP should both be supported. We'll see.

For the background on most of the pages, I plan to try to emulate the pattern of white swirls in the cloth of Jenny's wedding dress. The cakemaker is planning to use this pattern in the frosting too.