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January 27
February 1 | 3 | 8 | 10 | 15 | 17 | 22 | 24 | 29
March 2 | 7 | 9
| 14 | 16 | 21
| 23 | 28 | 30
April 4
This is a good page to bookmark.
The links on this syllabus will take you on divergent paths. I don't expect any of you to read -- or to need -- all of it. However, if you're going to progress towards the course objectives, I do expect all of you to read -- and to need -- much of it. It's up to you to balance your learning style against these resources.
We have 18 class sessions. For ten of them, you will be making individual and group presentations. One near the end will be a trouble-shooting workshop. For the other seven, I will lecture for the first hour and we will have hands-on computer skills building for the second hour.
January 27
Professional Expectations how
geeky are you?
February 1The Internet separating hype
from reality
February 3Research on the Internet turning
data into infomation
February 8Effects of the Internet issues,
problems, and trends
February 22The Transformation of the
Enterprise industries and business processes
March 7Electronic Documents linear
presentations and hypertext webs
March 9The Digital Development Process
turning infomation into knowledge
February 10, 15, 17Web Site Critique
February 24, 29, March 2Web Page Critique
March 21, 23Policy Issues
March 30, April 4The Transformation of the
Enterprise
For the things we have to learn before we can learn them, we
learn by doing them.
-- Aristotle
January 27copy and paste, view source, save
images
February 1tag text, make links, embed images
February 3add styles to pages
February 8use tables to
control layout and forms to get feedback
February 22crop, resize, and
color clip art
March 7make a PowerPoint presentation
March 9use style sheets
March 28FrontPage workshop
Beating your head against the wall burns 150 calories per
day.
-- Anonymous
We will not use a common dead-tree version of a textbook for this course. Why? The traditional publishing industry's product cycle is way too slow for Internet time. It typically takes two years for a traditional paper publisher to turn a finished manuscript into a textbook ready for the first day of class. To be ready for class in Spring 2000, the manuscript would have frozen in the winter of 1997-98. That's okay if the subject is Shakespeare or accounting. Shakespeare hasn't written anything new in the past two years. Rest assured that the Generally Accepted Accounting Principle are still generally accepted. However, quite a bit has happened in the way organizations use information.
What
Is The Internet (And What Makes It Work)
by Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf
The
Internet and the New Economy
by Alan S. Blinder.
An Internet Policy Institute series for the presidential candidates. Short and very authoritative. The first was written by two of the men who "invented" the Internet.
InternetWeek's Transformation of the Enterprise feature, especially Part 2: Transforming Business Processes.
While you're reading, ask yourself whether anything in your professional experience applies.
The
Cathedral and the Bazaar
by Eric Raymond
This somewhat geeky article was cited by the owners of Netscape when they opened up their proprietary source code two years ago and then sold themselves to AOL a little over one year ago.
The ClueTrain Manifesto
by Christopher Locke
These 95 theses, modeled after Martin Luther's from 450 years ago, are designed to shake up business-as-usual as radically as Luther shook up religion-as-usual. I'm not recommending that you buy the book, but here's the link to Amazon: The Cluetrain Manifesto. If you buy it directly after clicking on that link, Ricci Street gets a credit from the Amazon Associates' program that will help defray my out-of-pocket expenses.
"In
the Beginning Was the Command Line"
by Neal Stephenson
This one is optional, so I'll give you a teaser:
About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of
Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing
machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot
of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries.
But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even
stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This
was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some
sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug
it in and watch lights blink.
An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of
course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the
operating system came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and
zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to
manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes.
Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were
apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder
reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the
parlance of high-tech) "productized."
Twenty years later, of course, Bill Gates is the richest person in the world. Last November, Harvey Blume reviewed Stephenson's essay in Revenge of the Wizards in The Atlantic.
At these web sites, you should sign up by submitting your email address.
Wired magazine's Wired News;
sign up in the "free delivery" box on the left
Jack Teems' Neat Net Tricks
Tara
Calishain's ResearchBuzz
They will send email newsletters on a regular schedule. You can send an email to the editor, but you can't add anything to the next issue on your own.
Webmonster's Web Design
You'll be able to listen in while the top web designers discuss their craft. At first, most of the topics will seem like geek speak, but please persevere. You'll gradually catch on. It will help if you follow some of the URLs in the messages and especially those in the contributors' sigs.
Tip | Sign up for the digest version.
The Webmonster discussion list is very active; you'll receive a long email digest at least once a day. It has all the messages that have come in from readers sorted by threads. By following the posting instructions, you can add your voice to the discussion.
Professional Expectations - how geeky are you?
the network is the computer
hyperlinks subvert hierarchy
multiple
apps: open and resize two browsers and a text editor
copy and paste:
highlight | CTRL-C | place cursor | CTRL-V
view source:
right-click | source
save image:
right-click | save image as ..
Explore
Ricci Street and the WWW beyond.
A good place to start is the Ricci Street site map, set up like a table of contents.
Get in
the habit of viewing HTML source code.
Every so often, view the source code of a page and try to relate the code to the display on your screen.
Send
me an email at Doug@RicciStreet.net.
The email should carry an attachment -- your resume in .txt format. If your resume is in Word's .doc or some other proprietary format, please "wash" it in NotePad before you send it to me.
Visit
the Ground Zero Bistro.
Register and introduce yourself (by posting a message) in our course's threaded discussion forum.
How
geeky are you?
Respond to and submit this form that asks about your computer skills. It will help me understand how to pace the course.
Download
and install AIM (AOL's
Instant Messenger).
I hold office hours online from 10 to 11 AM on Saturdays. If you add me to your buddy list, you can chat with me at other times when I'm online. Chat with your teammates, too.
Contact
a classmate.
Chat with AIM and try two BuddyHelp sessions, one each way.
The Internet - separating hype from reality
tag
your text: <p>, <h1>, <h2>, ... <h6>
make links: <a
href="http://RicciStreet.net/"></a>
embed images: <img
src="images/foo.gif">
Continue coding your resume.
Tune up your operating system.
Windows 98 has Maintenance Wizard in the Start | Programs | Accessories | System Tools menu. You should explore all the items on the System Tools menu.
Read What
Is The Internet (And What Makes It Work) by Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G.
Cerf and The
Internet and the New Economy by Alan S. Blinder.
An Internet Policy Institute series for the presidential candidates. Short and very authoritative. The first one's a yawner, but it was written by two of the men who "invented" the Internet.
Read InternetWeek's Transformation of the
Enterprise feature, especially Part 2: Transforming Business
Processes.
While you're reading, ask yourself whether anything in your professional experience applies. Then go to the Bistro and talk about it before the next class.
Research on the Internet - turning data into infomation
add styles to pages
Email Doug your choices for team and policy issue to be listed on the
reports page
Email Doug your team's project description to be listed on the reports page
title - Selling Stuff Online
industry - retail stores
process - marketing/advertising
team members - Sharon, Pete
graphic and summary - to come
Start researching your industry, business process, and issue. Share
your research with your teammates and teacher via email and your classmates at
the Bistro.
Style your resume by using the style tag
in the head of the document. Send the edited .htm file to me and I'll post it
before the next class. We'll keep at it until it looks great and the code is
clean.
Effects of the Internet - trends, problems, and issues
Information
design
Web Design 101
Squishy's Crash Course in Information Design
10 Questions About Information Architecture
The Foundations of Web Design
ABCs of Building a Web Site: A Web Design Tutorial for Rank Beginners
Introduction
to tables, forms
and frames
We're talking about the tags at the bottom half of the Webmonkey Cheat Sheet. As usual, I highly recommend Webmonkey's articles on tables, forms, and frames.
send
Doug your styled resume for final posting
I expect several more drafts until it looks good and is cleanly coded.
Before February 9, submit a critique of the Web site you will
present on the 10th, 15th or 17th.
You should choose a site from the industry you are researching for your Gizmos, Inc., project. If you can't decide, please email me and I'll make the decision for you.
Web site critique explanation on case page
Web site critique form
read The ClueTrain Manifesto,
by Christopher Locke
These 95 theses, modeled after Martin Luther's from 450 years ago, are designed to shake up business-as-usual as radically as Luther shook up religion-as-usual. I'm not recommending that you buy the book, but here's the link to Amazon: The Cluetrain Manifesto. If you buy it directly after clicking on that link, Ricci Street gets a credit from the Amazon Associates' program that will help defray my out-of-pocket expenses.
We seem to have false virus warnings being passed around the class. If you receive an email urging you to forward it to all your friends, please check it out first. I sent a few of you some intemperate responses and finally made a web page explaining what's going on.
The Transformation of the Enterprise: industries and business processes
I hope to spend most of the second hour demonstrating how to use FrontPage for some basic pagemaking. Feel free to bring your laptop and mouse to click along with me.
Images
Tables
Format tables
Add text and images
Add columns and rows
Forms
Add radio buttons
Add check boxes
Add text boxs
Frames
Web page critique explanation on case page
Web page critique form
your team's index.html page (homework
#3)
I made a directory for every team that has given me a team name: biorite, events, i3, suresire, unlimited. Here's a reduced-size screen shot of what's on the mba600 directory on the server in N Carolina. The others, erp, mp3, music, and travel, are from last semester; note the dates of last update.
Right now, your directories are empty except for a sub-directory called "images", which itself is empty. If you try this URL:
http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/lane/mba600/biorite/
(substitute your team's directory name for "biorite") the server will look for a default page and return an error message or a default directory listing because it won't find an index.html page.
Thus, I'd like each team to send me an index.html page that I can put into the team's directory. It doesn't have to say much yet. You can keep revising it and sending me a new one.
Sending me a new one is still a problem. I have not yet figured out how to make that a reliable process for everyone. If someone on your team seems to be able to send .htm files without corruption or other goofiness, that's great. Otherwise, we might have to resort to floppies.
FrontPage lets you customize many features. If you want to know what I recommend after using FrontPage for almost four years, this page has a lot of screenshots and explanations. The screenshots are full size, so they'll take a while to load.
Tip | When you're learning FrontPage as your first HTML page editor, avoid the Themes and Shared Borders features.
FrontPage beginner's tutorial at Actden.com.
Click on the top right of the home page. It's designed for 6th graders, which is about the level you want to be working on while you learn bloatware like FrontPage. I recommend these sections:
1. A Fresh Start
2. Text
3. Images
5. Hyperlinks
6. Tables
7. Previews
8. Web site
except Expand with Word 2000
10. Forms
I recommend that you omit these sections:
4. More Images
9. Style
11. Data
12. Reports
13. Publish
Training Tools' Introduction to FrontPage 2000
online version
downloadable and printable version
instructions for exchanging
.htm files
special instructions for AOL
users
Web Snapshot
Take a snapshot of your web usage.
http://www.arachnoid.com/browser/index.html
If you go to that page, it will read the information off your computer and display it in the grey box on the lower part of the page. Please copy and paste (CTRL C and CTRL V) the table -- everything between the red horizontal lines -- into an email and send it to me so that I can give you a y for homework #8.
When it gets to your email, it should look something like this:
What you see here is what I'm recommending. Many of you seem stuck with a screen size of 800 x 600 on your laptops. You may find a trade-off between screen size and color. The one can go only so high before the other starts going down.
If you don't mind my showing you, here's what you're using now:
How did I get that to display on a Ricci Street web page? Well, you might be surprised at what else your computer tells other computers on the Web. The folks on the security panel might want to learn more.
Meanwhile, do a view source and check out the Javascript about two-thirds of the way down between the script tags. Pare away the HTML and there's not much left.
Compare your snapshot to everyone else's. WebSnapshot publishes up-to-the-day stats on Web usage patterns and user profiles.
Continue researching your panel topic
Instead of going to the library, copying down citations (publisher, date, etc.), xeroxing pages that you want to reread, and re-typing quotations, you're going to keep a Web log and send it to me as you go along.
The
Web the Way It Was
by Leander Kahney
Wired News, February 23, 2000
A weblog, or blog, is a regularly updated list of links and commentary to interesting material on the Web. Because the majority are self-published, precise numbers are difficult to gauge. Observers, however, agree that weblogging is growing like never before.
If you want to see what other folks' web logs look like, UberSearch will take your keywords and return only web logs. (Click << Go >> on the left to go to the one you choose.) For example, I entered "copyright" (without the quotation marks) and got hundreds of returns, among them the web log of Dan Bricklin, who "invented" the spreadsheet twenty years ago. By the way, I think that the UberSearch page has a very attractive visual design.
I'm recommending above that you do the Web log assignment yourself and send it to me so that I can post it to the Web. However, if you want to automate much of your part of the process and completely take me out of it, try Blogger.
How is it different from ink on paper?
organized email
newsgroups
discussion lists
Bistro
What is information design? What do information designers do?
What is interface design?
Web browsers will display images that are in either .gif or .jpg format. Both are compressed from the standard bitmapped file, which may have a .bmp, .tif, or similar format.
You probably have an couple of image editors on your PC. Open an image in them and try as "Save As .." then "Save As Type" to see whether it will save images in .gif or .jpg format. For example, the Paint program (Start | Programs | Accessories) will save images in those formats. Unfortunately, Paint isn't a very powerful editing tool.
If you don't have the appropriate image editor or if you would like one with more power, download Paint Shop Pro from Shareware.com. You're looking for psp414.exe (Paint Shop Pro Version 4.14) for Win95/NT.
For Art Today, you'll need a password. Email me.
style sheets
make a short presentation with PowerPoint
read The
Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond
This somewhat geeky article was cited by the owners of Netscape when they opened up their proprietary source code two years ago and then sold themselves to AOL a little over one year ago.
learn more about the open
source community
four basic processes: one foot in the old world, one foot in the new
usability: data-based decision making process
concept mapping: fitting content to user
interface design: words, images, graphics
rapid prototyping: FrontPage at its best
panel discussions on Tuesday, March 21, 6 - 8 PM
6 - 7
security
Toni, Betsy, Pat, Nadra
7 - 8
privacy
Justin, Crystal, Kevin, Linh
panel discussions on Thursday, March 23, 6 - 8 PM
6 - 7
copyright
Cris, Dawn, Gen, Sandy
7 - 8
taxation
Mary, Sheldon, Ward, Pam, John
take the learning styles inventory
web design
I'm going to use FrontPage to import (download) one of the pages from one of your projects. I'm then going to edit that page.
page design
I'm going to open one of the images from that page in Paint Shop Pro and optimize it for the Web.
Finally, I'm going to transfer the edited files back to the server.
We're going to go into the room where you're going to give your group presentations. We're going to figure out how to set up the room and run the projector. We're going to talk about how those presentations will be different from the ones you gave earlier in the mod.
Treat it like a theater production. You're the producer, director, actor, and script writer as well as the set, costume, and lighting designer.
hard to hear and understand <----> loud and clearly enunciated
tip| Speak slowly and say the endz of your wordz.
inappropriate clothes <----> appropriate business clothes
negative expressions and postures <----> positive expressions and postures
tip | You're visible on stage even when someone else is speaking.
default staging: dark, hard to read <----> well-staged: lighting, positioning
clumsy use of technology <----> unobtrusive use of technology
tip | Take command of the space and make it your own.
no attempt to break fourth wall <----> effective breaking, especially with humor
tip | Even unreceptive audiences want to be entertained.
team presentations - schedule TBA
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The Syllabus
