Being successful with assignments
Overview
The weekly assignments in Intermediate Scripting Languages are designed to provide practice of new information presented in class/online sessions, use of downloads, Level One learning objects, and your exploration and discovery from browsing CSS/XHTML sites and additional learning objects levels. The focus in assignments will include:
- Adding to your knowledge and experience of using cascading styles sheets with well-formed XHTML mark-up;
- Weekly entries in your weblog;
- Observing your learning about "how you learn best" and how you improve your learning skills;
- Conceptualizing and planning a fifteen page (minimum) web site including purpose, goals and objectives, target audience, navigation flowchart, and layouts for each page of the site.
Personal Weblogs
Students will create a personal weblog through http://www.uniblogs.org. There are two writing focuses in the blogs: your observations about how you learn best, and your progress at expanding your learning skills by trying to develop new types of learning that can be successful for you.
News Aggregator
A news aggregator is a software tool (online or downloaded to your desktop) that allows you to subscribe to weblogs through the use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication). As you do research to learn more about CSS/XHTML you will subscribe to sites that you found particularily useful to your studies. The news aggregator should be updated weekly with at least three-five new sites found. the continuation of your aggregator beyond this class will provide you with ongoing learning opportunities. A suitable online news aggregrator is Bloglines. You can open an account and begin searching for worthy sites to subscribe with. If you are interested in a news aggregator for your personal computer, please ask the instructor.
First Project
During weeks one - five you will be working with a lot of new content about cascading style sheets. It is very important to practice CSS as much as possible as a means of understanding it and building your experience with this different, yet much more efficient process of creating web sites. During these early weeks your assignment will be to build a "Personal Learning Site" that will help you continue your learning and experiences. The site will be your own design/layout and will be created each week as you practice new skills with CSS. The actual content of the site is for you to determine, for the main goal of this project is to have a consistent site to be experimenting with as you learn. So, rather than a 3 page assignment that has a different purpose each week, you will be adding on to a personal site that could be a valuable tool for your continuing studies. More details about what you might include in such a site will be discuss in class.
Final Project
The final project will begin week 6 with the completion of your Web Site Plan, and continue the remainder of the course. The final project will be a minimum of fifteen (15) pages, and must be a site that responds to a "real-world" problem. This means that even though the site is your creation, it needs to reflect a real web site that is created for a real business need. Just building a site to get your fifteen pages done is not a suitable site. This project must be portfolio quality and will be viewed by professional developers as an example of good information design and graphic design. Each of your web site pages should be well-formed XHTML and CSS and each page should be validated to assure that it meets these standards for quality.