Steven D. Krause

I was up later than I would have preferred last night so I could finish posting the grades for English 444, Writing for the World Wide Web. This was the third time I’ve taught this class and it was easily the most successful of my efforts to date. I thought this version of the class went as well as it did because of the students. I suppose that’s true for my other classes too, but I have to say this was especially the case with this group. As I was figuring out the grades last night, I realized again that I was darn lucky because I really did have an excellent combination of graduate and undergraduate students, and they were just across the board really diligent and hard-working. When you have students who come into the class already enthusiastic for the subject (and who else would voluntarily sign up for a class called “Writing for the World Wide Web?”), it makes the teacher’s job pretty easy.

Though I thought I did a pretty good job, too.

Things I learned (and will hopefully remember the next time I teach this course):

• For reasons too complicated to explain here, the main project of the class ended up being a collaborative revision of the web site that is supposed to provide information about graduate studies in the EMU English department. I’m not sure if I would do this again or not. For one thing, I’m not sure an opportunity for a “real” collaborative project will drop in my lap again. For another, the assignment took a lot of time and I had to cancel some of the other projects I had planned for the class. On the other hand, I think the sites and reports that groups created for this project were excellent, and the feedback I’ve gotten from students so far suggest they got a lot out of this activity. So I don’t know; we’ll see.
• The Lynch and Horton book Web Style Guide is excellent and I will most certainly use it again. I hope they come out with a new edition. On the other hand, I certainly would not use the Nico Macdonald book What is Web Design? again. I picked it pretty much “blind” as the result of a recommendation from a mailing list. But this turned out to be bad advice; personally, I wouldn’t recommend this book for much of anything.
• As I wrote about way back in December and again a bit in January, I’ve always had a conflict, perhaps just a personal one, between the “technology” part of things and the “writing” part of things with this class. This semester, I put these concerns aside and I assigned Eric Meyer’s book, Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide. Now, I’m glad I finally really learned more than the basics of CSS and I think the Meyer book is an essential resource for anyone interested in this, but I don’t think I’ll teach this book again. We ended up spending two weeks on the Meyer book, which I think was about a week too much. Next time around, I think I’ll look for more of an introductory book or web resource.

  On the other hand, I think it’s fair to say that knowing some basics about CSS turned out to be very important for everyone, including me. I also think that the order I did this helped a lot. We spent over the first month of class on these sorts of “computer geek” activities: basic and not so basic HTML, file transfer, basic photoshop and image manipulation, and CSS. Once we got a handle on the tools, we moved to issues of design, and this semester has convinced me that this is definitely the way to go. The design issues make a heck of a lot more sense when you know a bit about the tools you’re designing with.

• I probably will have some kind of assignment next time where students will have to individually create style sheets for a common page, something along the lines of the CSS Zen Garden project.
• Next time, I’ll probably have more readings/discussions about blogs and content management systems like drupal, but I don’t think I’ll use a collaborative blog set-up again. Maybe I just need to figure out for myself how to do this correctly, but once again, I really wish I had set up a mailing list for the class; it would made basic communication a lot easier.

Charlie Lowe (with the help of others, he insists) has pieced together a pretty nice web-based bibliography about blogs and teaching. I’ll certainly want to go back and look at this more carefully, but I will say two things for now. First, I made the list ;-) . Second, I wish I would have seen this earlier.

For the record, I am not Steve Krause II, and I never played the part of a crash victim, nor was I in a porn movie. The weird things you find on the ‘net….

See this game, “Home Run,” which has directions in German and a domain address in, I don’t know, Switzerland or the Czech Republic or some place (but I know Germany is “de”). Anyway, the goal is to help the drunk home.

Those sophisticated Europeans….

Here’s another interesting article that appeared in Canada’s Globe and Mail about the importance of handwriting, “Is the Pen Mightier than the Keyboard?” by Margaret Philip. It is a story that features the “usual suspects” regarding the demise of handwriting, though it does include an interesting reference to a study:

Prof. [Marvin] Simner [a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario] conducted a research study a few years ago in which he compared the writing of pupils in public elementary schools in London, Ont., with that of children enrolled in private Dutch Reform schools, where handwriting and the distinct flourishes of the European-style script are still taught.

Not only was the private-school writing more legible and artfully crafted, students could write faster, producing a full sentence more than a minute faster than their public-school counterparts.

“This gets to be very important,” Prof. Simner says. “Obviously, if handwriting is slower and you’re taking notes, you’re not copying down everything that’s important. Children who are struggling with handwriting and are slower tend to forget what they want to say because their thoughts are fleeting. And that affects their grades.”

Ah, if they keep notes on a laptop, then typing speed matters a whole lot more, doesn’t it?

In any event, I don’t think it’s an “either/or” situation. My son, who is in second grade, spends a fair amount of time in his schooling working on his handwriting, including on cursive. I’m told that cursive is taken more seriously in the third grade, maybe in the fourth too. That isn’t a whole lot different than when I was a kid.

Furthermore, I recall the shift to keyboarding in junior high when I was a kid 25 years ago; I can’t remember if it was seventh or eighth grade, but I definitely remember taking typing. As I think about it now, the teaching technique for the course was bizarre. The teacher (a woman who I imagine was not exactly thrilled to be teaching five sections of typing a day every day) stood at the front of the room, standing before a raised desk with a typewriter on it. All of the students sat in rows before their electric (I think they were electric) typewriters. There were typing instruction books that stood before us like tents. “Turn to page 14,” the teacher would say. “Hands in place.” We’d put our hands in place, index fingers resting on the f and the j. “Begin,” and then we’d type whatever phrases were on that page to test our fingering.

A pretty stupid class, but I still touch-type pretty well. I can’t say the same about my current use of cursive.

The end of the semester and school year is near, so I don’t have much time to post. But besides being one of the busiest months in the school year, April also is National Poetry Month. I was reminded of this not by the fine poets who teach here at EMU but by some fellow comp/rhet folks. Go figure.

Anyway, let me direct you to two different posts for your poetic musings:

• Mike at Vitia has a GREAT found poem called “The Disordered House” that I personally think he ought to send out, maybe to College English (I think they still publish poems, don’t they?)
• Collin Brooke has this link to “HTTP in tha House,” which turns the text on a web page into rap lyrics. I think Collin’s poem turned out pretty good; mine, not so much. Here’s mine, which is based on the course description for my “Writing for the World Wide Web” class:

this means that you are
other words tar
class top style margin left
class should bereft
learn about software help your
a b drawer
chunk of reading
and writing about the world heading
web site into a
old that can make a passe
p blockquote p
access to a personal tee
p not surprisingly there will
that genre this project will swill
you will propose
talking about basic design prose

I like those last couple lines a lot. Sort of sums up the purpose of that class….

I don’t know if this is a good idea or a bad idea, but here’s the story: Adobe Buys Macromedia for $3.4 Billion. It might be good because a combined Adobe/Macromedia could defend itself against Microsoft; it might be bad because the sort of interesting differences between Macromedia’s products might get sorta squished into Adobe’s products, and vice-versa.

Interesting.

Anyway, I now return to end of the semester grading and other duties….

EMUsatalite
Originally uploaded by steven_d_krause.

I’m not much of a meme kinda guy, but just to build on posts by Collin, Jeff and Jenny (and because it was kind of fun playing around with this in Flickr), I present my “memory map.” I don’t think I played the game correctly because it’s not a map of where I grew up or live or anything like that, nor is it a story per se. But like I said, it was fun playing with both Google’s Map site and with Flickr’s note editing options. Click on the picture to see the notes.