RSA Animation

From the RSA Animate Channel on YouTube. “This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA’s Benjamin Franklin award.”

Outstanding lecture and supporting animation by the UK group Cognitive Media. Enjoy. Discuss.

The comic mouth

A great post by  Ron Harris on the history of drawing the comic masculine mouth. As a cartoonist, this is one of the trickiest parts of the anatomy to get right. Great article. http://smurfswacker.blogspot.com/2009/11/technique-talk.html

Flip Flap animation

I came across this video on the Gurney Journey blog site. Very cool approach to animation.

dot slash notation

Most of my students that are new to coding are thrown off by the dot slash (./) notation used in filepath values in the href attributes in HTML. I was first exposed to using dots and dot dots back in the late 1980s when I first got my hands on a MS-DOS machine (prior to Windows). The way you created directories (folders) and files, moved around directory structures and generally got things done was through keying in the commands from the shell prompt.

In 1989  I began working for the Intergraph Corporation where I taught a 3-D MicroStation-based engineering product (Project Engineer Pipe). In the early days of the program you opened the program by having to type in the program name from a shell prompt. The system was Unix based and moving from directory to another required the use of dot slash notation. In general MS-DOS, Unix, Linux, Amiga-DOS, OSX and any other command line interface to the hardware operating system uses a dot slash notation to move around the file and folder structure (or backslashes in the case of early MS-DOS). Graphic User Interfaces (GUI), use the dot slash notation behind the scenes to help you navigate the computer.

HTML

HTML is a collection of marked up text in a plain text file with a .htm or .html extension. HTML files reside on a computer designated as a web server. To specify to the browser where a particular file is located, you have to use the dot slash notation.

In a nutshell, it works like this…

Symbol Meaning
. current directory
.. parent directory (one directory up from current directory)
two directories up from current directory
…. three directories up from current directory

For example, let’s say we have the following code in a navigation bar…

<a href=”…/index.htm”>home</a>

In this statement the anchor tag is creating a link. The hypertexted word is “home”. The href attribute indicates which file will be opened when the home link is clicked. Because the filepath is …/index.htm, the file that is being opened is the index.htm file that is located two directories up from the current file, i.e.  the html file containing the code where the link is.

<a href=”index.htm”>home</a> index.htm file resides in current folder
<a href=”./index.htm”>home</a> index.htm file resides in current folder
<a href=”../index.htm”>home</a> index.htm file resides in parent  folder
<a href=”…/index.htm”>home</a> index.htm file resides two folders up.

COM1000-Week1

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/