Category Archives: for my students

article COM 1000 Beginning HTML for my students html

The big picture

April 9, 2012 – 11:44 am

For my students

When first learning HTML, there is a lot of information to take in. Keeping an eye on the BIG PICTURE can go a long way towards preventing overwhelm. The main web technologies are HTML, CSS, DOM, and Javascript. That’s four different technologies that are often offered as one beginning course in many colleges. Obviously, you are not going to master any of it by the end of one  semester.  So don’t stress yourself out thinking you need to.

If you remember these simple facts going forward, you can understand which technologies are used for which roles. It’ll help them organized in your head and allow you understand how to look at the page source without becoming overwhelmed:

  1. HTML is structure and layout. You can’t manipulate anything until you place it on a page and give it a name or at least understand how to access via the DOM. HTML enables you to place an element on in a document.
  2. CSS  is used to control how the HTML elements look and are positioned on the page
  3. Understanding the DOM is understanding how the browser organizes the elements on the page, so you can get to them with Javascript and control them.
  4. Javascript is the scripting language of the web (client-side). It is how you give some control of page content and behavior to your user. It is how you create dynamic interaction based on page events that are triggered by the user.
As you go forward, if you can remember those simple things, you will be better equipped to understand how to use each technology to create your pages.

 

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for my students NSCC

Registering

August 2, 2011 – 6:09 pm

This article is meant to address some frequent questions I get from Visual Communication students regarding registration.

Student question: How can I determine which general education classes are available online?

General Education Core Course Web Page

First you need to determine the corresponding course numbers for the Gen. Ed. classes you wish to take so you can determine if they are offered online during the semester you need. Fortunately, Nashville State offers a wide selection of online classes for General Education. The following link will take you to the NSCC General Education Core Course web page, http://ww2.nscc.edu/catalog/GenEdCoreCourses.html.

Let’s say you want to take the beginning English Composition course. According to the course rubric, the course number is ENGL 1010  (English Composition I). Now you want to determine if ENGL 1010 is offered during your semester as an online offering.

Information Technology Web Page

Go to the Information Technology page at  http://ww2.nscc.edu/it/. You will find the Term and Program fields followed by the Search button in the right column.  Enter the term you are interested in and the program your course rubric falls into.

For example, let’s say you want to find out the English Composition I course for the Fall 2011 semester. Select Fall 2011 in the Term field. Since the course rubric for the English Composition I course is ENGL 1010, select ENGL in the Program Field and then select the Search button.

The resulting page will show the following information on each course being offered (Note the offerings are by campus):

CRN, Course, Section, Course Name, Status, Enrolled, Seats Available, Days, Time, Room, Instructor, Session

Since the question was concerned with online courses, we are interested in the CRN, Course, Section, Course Name, and Seats Available fields.

CRN (Course Registration Number) is the number you put into the CRN field when you register online for the course.

Course and Course Name fields will ensure you are selecting the correct course, i.e. ENGL 1010 English Composition I.

Seats Available field indicates how many seats are left in the course. If the number is 0 (zero), the class is full.

Section field indicates when the class is offered according to the following rules for the Main Nashville Campus:

  • 100s are daytime on-ground classes
  • 300s are evening on-ground classes
  • 700s are online classes
  • 765 are hybrid classes, i.e. they have both online and physical meeting requirements as defined by the instructor’s syllabus

Since we are looking for an online ENGL 1010 course we are looking for a section with the following numbers, 760, 76Y, 76Z or other 700 number other than 765 which is reserved for hybrid classes.

The Results

For the Fall 2011 class the following options are available as of today (August 2, 2011):

81329  	ENGL-1010  	760  English Composition I 	25  0
82839 	ENGL-1010 	76T  English Composition I 	25  0
82663 	ENGL-1010 	76U  English Composition I 	25  0
82483 	ENGL-1010 	76V  English Composition I 	11  14
82482 	ENGL-1010 	76W  English Composition I 	16  9
81839 	ENGL-1010 	76X  English Composition I 	7   18
81331 	ENGL-1010 	76Y  English Composition I 	7   18
81330 	ENGL-1010 	76Z  English Composition I 	16  9

Note that according to the ENGL 1010 online course availability listed above for the Fall 2011 semester, the following CRNs have seats available, 82483, 82482, 81839, 81331, and 81330. Also note that these numbers are always changing during registration. Seats fill up fast. Just because you see 4 seats available for a course now, doesn’t mean they’ll be there tomorrow. Once you see enrollment availability, register immediately for that class and pay asap so you do not loose that registration.

Registering

Follow the steps at http://www.nscc.edu/student-resources/mynscc/ to learn how to register using myNSCC.

Student Question: How do I know which courses I should register for any given semester?

For Visual Communication students the following course information should help guide you.

The following classes are only offered during the Fall Semester:

  • COM 1305 Multimedia I–Flash®
  • ENGL 2116 Writing for the Web

The following classes are only offered during the Springs Semester:

  • COM 1300 Site Building I–Dreamweaver®
  • BUS 1050 Legal Issues for the Web
  • COM2020 Multimedia Design (formerly Storyboarding & Scriptwriting)
  • COM2700 Multimedia and Web Design Capstone

 

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COM 1000 Beginning HTML for my students

COM1000-Week1

September 9, 2010 – 1:15 am

There is a lot of information to digest in the first week of COM1000. Let me see if I can dispel some confusion regarding the assignments. First, don’t panic. It’s way too early in the semester to be panicking.

The assessment plan lays out how the course is assessed. Discussions, quizzes, assignments, exams, and projects are diverse ways to involve your thinking and assess how you are grasping the concepts. The assessment plan can be found in the Getting Started section.

HTML is largely about hands-on coding. Each unit in the book walks you through a project. The necessary files are provided to you as a .zip file in the Assignment instructions. The zip file for unit A is unitA.zip and can be found in the Assignment 1a link.

The in-class lecture, if you’re taking the course on-ground, is on the big picture ideas from the chapter. The chapter will introduce the necessary concepts and will walk you through a project so you get hand-holding through the creation of the code. For online classes, the book chapter is your lecture.

The end of the chapter has three main sections: A review quiz, the Skills Review section, and the independent exercises. The review quiz will prepare you for the online quizzes. They are for your benefit but are not “required”. The online quizzes are required and you have three attempts. The Skills Review section is required. You will be graded on how you complete the Skills Review section and it will be included in your .zip archive that you submit each week.

The Skills Review is good but it holds your hand the whole way. To really learn web design, you need to create some pages from scratch, thinking your way through the design and troubleshooting problems that arise. For that reason, you are also required to complete a project where you are given less guidance. The Independent Challenges at the end of the book are designed to accomplish that.

I stray from the posted assignments in that I don’t require you complete all the Independent Challenges. While I encourage you to do it as it will give you more practice, I don’t require it. Most of you are Web Design students and will benefit from creating an online resume or portfolio that will grow with you as you move through the curriculum. So I want to encourage you to create a personal portfolio as your independent project.

Both your Skills Review project in the paradise folder, and the your portfolio project will both be archived into one .zip file for submission each week.

Week 1 is largely about learning notepad, textEdit, the discussion forum, email, how the class works, what I expect in the class and the basics of structuring an HTML document.  You absolutely MUST do the Unit A chapter project and the Skills Review at the end as it will prepare you for unit B. The unit A files do not have to turned in, but they will be part of unitB which will be submitted for a grade.

So what to do?

For week1:

  • Introductory message in the discussion forum
  • Complete the project in Unit A (this will require you to download unitA.zip)
  • Complete the Skills Review section at the end of the chapter

How to set up your folders

I have created a video to illustrate how your folders should be set up and how to approach creating your folders, archiving them, and submitting them. The URL to the video is at http://www.edrawingboard.com/wordpress/2009/09/14/arranging-files-and-folder-structure/

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COM 1000 Beginning HTML for my students Framesets general

Framesets are a valid W3C doctype

October 28, 2008 – 6:48 pm

For my students…

On page H-17 of your text, Cox states, “… Moreover, framesets are no longer part of the W3C standard”1. This statement has caused more than a few emails and discussion board postings. Let me clear something up. Framesets ARE a valid document type according to the XHTML1.0 standard2. The author, I believe, is drawing your attention to the fact that framesets should be used with caution since they have the following characteristic, they do not have a unique URL. This causes the following:

  • They cannot be bookmarked
  • You cannot send a link
  • Search engines cannot find them, or at least provide a unique URL to direct traffic to your site

In conclusion, don’t be afraid to use framesets, they are valid markup. Just use them when their function is indicated – don’t created an entire web site using them.

References

Cox, Vicki L., Wermers, Lynn, Reding, Elizabeth Eisner (2007). HTML Complete, Third Ed., The Illustrated Series, Thomson Course Technology, Boston, MA. ISBN 0-619-26844-1. http://www.course.com.

Three Flavors of XHTML1.0. http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/#recommendations

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