Preface

There are a variety of things one could do in a "teaching with technology course". One of the considerations in deciding what to do is that some technologies can be experienced or learned fairly quickly whereas others are often the subject of semester length courses. I've grouped technologies into three categories below based on the amount of time to pick up:

Easy to learn or experience

• Email
• Asychronous discussion
• Synchronous discussion (chat)
• Instant Messaging
• Windows NetMeeting
• Search engines
• Course Management Systems like WebCT or Blackboard
• Teleconference, streaming video (easy to experience, harder to produce)

Intermediate to learn (e.g. less than a course)

• Word
• Excel
• Powerpoint
• Access
• HTML Editors (Dreamweaver) -- less than a full course once one knows HTML

Longest to learn (typically each is taught in a separate course)

• HTML
• Graphics programs (Fireworks, Photoshop, or Illustrator)
• Animation (Flash)
• Authorware
• Director
• Client-side scripting for web pages (JavaScript)
• Data-driven web pages (Active Server Pages or Cold Fusion)
• Video editing (Premiere)

If one does a different topic per week in the course, the course could end up being superficial; however, if students having different backgrounds, it may be difficult to find a more substantial technology (groups two or three above) in which students have roughly the same background. That is the purpose of the student technology survey. In previous versions of the course (e.g. see the Spring 2003 syllabus), different students apparently learned different technologies and the instruction was not done by the course instructor, e.g. students could take one or more of the IT workshops offered to all students at GMU).

In the absence of complete information about student backgrounds and their goals for this course, I have tried to construct a course covering a variety of relevant technologies. However, I think the course may be more beneficial for us if we try to find a technology that takes awhile to learn and most everyone in the class wants to learn, and then adjust the following schedule to make time for learning this technology. My suggestion is that we do HTML and Dreamweaver but we'll have to see about student backgrounds and interests.

If we were to do HTML/Dreamweaver, I would propose to teach the underlying HTML for all topics and also teach you how to do these things in Dreamweaver. I would also cover the site management tools provided by Dreamweaver such as site definition and library items. The HTML topics would be:

• Creating a html page and text formatting
• Creating links
• Using images in web pages
• Tables
• FTP
• Frames
• Forms

Currently we only have a Dreamweaver classroom for one day (Saturday, October 11) but I expect that can be increased given that we meet at off-hours.

In addition to the above decision as to whether we collectively spend a fair amount of time with one technology, there are other decisions regarding the amount of time regarding various elements in the course. For example, we could decide to spend more time, either individually or collectively, with discipline-specific software.

Bill Pegram
September 12, 2003