Project 1: Web Portfolio

The course will revolve around a web portfolio that contains the majority of the work you do over the semester. For this project you will pick one of three areas to focus on: personal, academic, or professional. The move into electronic publication means that it is crucial to consider a primary audience and purpose for your site and create your web identity or ethos with that target in mind.

While the portfolio must contain the work that you do over the semester—responses to weekly reading, rhetorical analyses of other web sites, tutorials, proposals, and the final project—this work may be highlighted in your design and structure or placed in the background should you choose a more personal or professional focus. If you take a personal approach, you might highlight topics of interest, pop culture, or family. Such a site might have a brighter or quirkier color scheme or might opt for a more associative rather than literal architecture (link structure). A professional site, on the other hand, might contain a professional resume, information related to your professional field, and examples of your professional work. Such a site would call for more subdued colors and a more literal, user-friendly architecture. Should neither of these options appeal to your needs, you can simply focus on the site as an academic portfolio for the class. Such a site might also focus on your area of academic interest. Here, a literal, user-friendly structure is appropriate (you don't want me to struggle to find your assignments) but there is more creative leeway than a site with a professional focus.

Project 2: Creative or Informational Site

For the final project, you can select one of two primary approaches: creative or informational.

A creative media project is your opportunity to experiment with the wider expressive range made available through hypertext and multimedia. You can do a hypertext poem, a hypertext short story, a series of montage photos, a photographic essay, a video piece or digital film, or a Macromedia Flash piece. Even PowerPoint can be used creatively to produce a multimedia project, and blogs can be used as a medium to develop fictional characters and track their experiences. I assume creative writing or literature students will be more interested in this option, especially if it can support the academic, personal, or even professional interests established in the web portfolio—you will want to develop a creative project that can be showcased in your web portfolio. What you decide to do for this project will depend on your personal or professional interests and either your previous technical experience or desire to learn a particular new technology. While usability testing is generally seen as an informational process, user experience is still vital to a quality creative project. Creative media should produce a particular kind of mood or response from the audience. User testing, with a fair amount of tweaking to produce the right kinds of questions, can help determine a successful creative project. Instead of reading a poem in front of a crowd to gauge its effectiveness, you put the audience in front of the computer and monitor their experience.

An informational web site can be developed around any topic, but its main purpose will be to inform its users. The web site can be a personal site such as a fan site (based on a particular band, TV show, cultural practice, etc.) or a family genealogy site, an academic site (based on a particular topic, author, or issue), a non-profit site (for an organization or focused on an issue), or a business site (focused on a real or fictitious company). For example, you may have a friend with a small business who needs a web site, or you may have a project that needs to be done at your job and they may be willing to let you produce that site as part of the class, or you may work on campus for an organization that needs a web site or needs to revise an old site. If you are a teacher, you may want to build a site around one of your classes or that develops a topic related to your teaching. The possibilities are pretty endless. If you choose to work with a real client to develop multimedia documents for web-based, CD-Rom, or PowerPoint delivery, you will need to arrange an initial meeting, analyze their existing documents and needs, propose a plan for web or media delivery, and formally present the work to the client. Whatever you decide to do, you should choose something that can be applicable to your life—a site that you will continue to use after the course is over or that will enhance your professional work. Here the emphasis will be on usability and information architecture. For these types of projects, usability testing is a must. Any professional setting will benefit from your experience with user tests in this class.

Tutorials

At the end of each project, I will ask you to look back at the technologies you have learned and develop a tutorial for completing a particular task in a particular program. Imagine that you are writing this tutorial for other students in the class or for students in future 505 classes. The steps in the process will need to be clear and detailed. Screen shots for major steps in the process will need to be included.

Proposals

For both major projects I will ask you to write a proposal. For Project 1, we will do a site specification document in class for a participation grade. I will comment on this and ask you to revise it into a more formal proposal. For Project 2, I will give you a more detailed proposal assignment that can be used as a basis for a client-side proposal should you need one.

Usability Test

Usability studies are tests of a site that assess a user's ease of navigation and information retrieval. These are often done on very large scales for corporate web sites. For Project 2 we will set up very small studies with just a few participants to give you a sense of how this process works and to help you think more specifically about web sites from a user's point of view. There are three basic approaches to assessing usability:

• Having a usability expert come in to analyze a site based on standard design and navigation criteria established in the published research.
• Bringing in a small number of actual users to perform a script of user tasks and assessing their physical and mental responses to the site's structure and content.
• Sending experts in to an actual workplace in order to analyze the user's interaction with the site in a real context.

In each case, information gathered about the site's design, navigation, architecture, and content are fed back into revisions of the site to make it more user-friendly. The goal is to create a site that can be inhabited and traversed seamlessly. For our purposes, option 2 is what we will strive for, but depending on your particular project, option 3 may be possible on a limited scale. The larger goal is to develop an understanding of usability so you can operate as an "expert" in future workplace situations.

Participation

Participation in this class is a calculated grade. In my experience, it is a grade that is easy to forget about. It is often the lowest grade across the board. Don't let this happen to you.

• Attendance: roll will be checked each day and numerically factored into the participation grade.
• Presentations: on days that I ask you to present an analysis of a web site, I will check off those who participate.
• Portfolio steps: each week I will give you a participation grade for completing the corresponding step in the current project (see assignments linked from the syllabus for weekly breakdowns).
• Weekly responses: each week I will visit your portfolios and give a participation grade for having the analysis done and uploaded. Responses should be 450-550 words and either summarize and respond to the readings or summarize the readings and apply the concepts to the analysis of a site.
• Blog discussions: often times blogs in the classroom devolve into just another way to post information to the web. It takes a lot of effort to keep conversations alive when everyone is so busy. So to encourage more class discussions on the reading and assignments, I will give a participation grade each time you post or comment. The more posts you have, the higher your participation grade will be. In addition to posting your short reading responses to the web, post them to the blog and comment on other posts. But also post questions about the reading or a tech issue, a cool link, site, or online article you found. Try to keep it informal and conversational. Sometimes I'll have in class assignments for you to post to the blog. Sometimes you'll have lab time in class to post to the blog. Just try to get in the habit of making it a part of the class.
• Workshops/labs: if you attend a workshop bring me verification and I will give you credit toward participation; if you get help in a lab, ask for a signed note for verification (obviously this is open to fraud, but I trust you).
• Individual effort to learn the technologies: this is the only non-calculable participation grade; it will be the x-factor when it comes down to giving final grades. If you are on the borderline, my sense of your effort outside of class could mean the difference between an A and a B.

Percentages

The following is a breakdown of percentages.

Project 1	30 %
Project 2	40 %
Tutorials and Proposals	10 %
Usability Test	10 %
Participation	10 %
	-------
	100 %