Course Policies
- Required Texts
- Norman, Donald A. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday
Things. New York: Basic Books, 2004. ISBN 0-465-05136-7
- Maeda, John. The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Business, Technology,
Life. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006. ISBN 0-262-13472-1
- Online Text (Available for free)
- Required Technology Access
- Required Materials
- A big, blank bound sketchbook
- Blank CD/DVD-ROMs for routine backups
- Very Strongly Recommended but Not Absolutely Required Technology Access
- Commercial hosting space and the domain of your name, e.g., karlstolley.com;
more information about this will be offered in class. Bottom line:
we’re buying fewer books in hopes that the money that would have been
spent on those can go towards your domain and hosting.
- Other Recommended Technology
- A digital camera
- Personal copy of Adobe CS3
- OpenOffice suite (free,
open-source alternative to Microsoft Office; MS Office 2007 documents
are not allowed in this class.)
Course Description
“COM 530: Online Design: Web Standards, Findability, and the Semantic Web”
covers very recent advancements in web production in terms of 1) technologies
and languages for production and 2) modes of communication in/on/through
the emerging “semantic web.” The focus of our projects and work in the course
will be on production (rather than critique/analysis), allowing you to build
a number of digital artifacts to add to your professional/graduate portfolio.
In building these artifacts, you will gain proficiency in crucial web production
languages such as XHTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript/ECMAScript, and perhaps PHP
and MySQL. In learning these languages, you will also learn their suitability
for different rhetorical situations, (visual) designs, and audiences—implementing
them in order to reach the widest audience necessary for your communication
goals, taking into account issues of accessibility and usability.
The three core threads of this course will be web standards, findability,
and the semantic web; a description of each thread follows.
- Web standards: Although the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been issuing “recommendations” for
languages like HTML and CSS since the mid-to-late 1990s, these recommendations,
or standards, have only recently been employed in Web browsers (since
roughly 2000). Web designers and other producers of web content have
been slow and hesitant to adopt newer, standards-based methods of production—though
such approaches are certainly gaining momentum. Standards-based Web production
will be a central focus of this course.
- Findability: The concept of “findability” goes beyond
visual location of elements (e.g., navigation, contact information) on
a page or within a single site to how pages are found and indexed by automated
search engines and new, emergent forms of social site searching/rating
(e.g., Digg.com, StumbleUpon) and social bookmarking (del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia.com).
We will examine production practices for increasing findability on the
Web, and explore methods and ethics of search engine optimization (SEO).
- Semantic web: The concept of the Web as primarily, if
not exclusively, a visual medium for human consumption is as ubiquitous
as it is incomplete. The semantic web of today—RSS feeds, microformats—is
only scratching the surface of a deeper semantic web that will increase
the flexibility and interoperability of information that can be read by
machines, not just human beings. We will explore ways to add semantic data
to standard web pages, primarily through XHTML and microformats, and do
some limited work with applications of XML, such as RSS.
We will weave each of these threads into a fabric that includes information
architecture, several flavors of design (chiefly information, visual, and
experience design) in order to produce digital artifacts that not only work,
but that work well and that are accessible, sustainable, extensible—and
even enjoyable to use.
A Note to Anyone Frightened by the Preceding Acronyms
As the course description suggests, we’re going to be doing some heavy-duty
work with technology in this class. Regardless of your skill level, though,
you will receive the support, guidance, and instruction you need to succeed
in the class. It is not required or even important that you be a technical
whiz; we’ll all be working at different levels, with the technological goal
of the class being only that everyone advances. Regardless, email or come
see me ASAP if you need help.
Key Course Goals
- Engage in Intensive Web/Online Production: Our primary
goal in this course is to work with production technologies to produce
personally and professionally meaningful digital artifacts. All of our
production work will be tied directly to course projects, which everyone
will be encouraged to tailor to fit their own interests and ambitions.
However, know that all production work will be done from the ground up;
you need not have any technical background to benefit from this course.
Individuals with strong backgrounds will have the opportunity to revise
and expand their abilities.
- Talk About Technologies and Production Methods: People
outside of technology sciences sometimes have difficulty communicating
confidently about technologies and methods of production; we'll work to
build our abilities to talk with one another (and others outside of tech
comm, broadly conceived) about how to evaluate, select, and implement technology
for production.
- Develop Grounded Production Approaches: Beyond the course's
focus on hands-on production, we will be reading different works from rhetoric,
design, ethics, and experience to ensure that our production work doesn't
occur in some vacuum dictated solely by technology.
- Address Sustainability and Accessibility: Accessibility
encompasses both the needs of different users as well as the many devices
that users control for accessing web/digital content. We'll examine how
to employ accessible design practices that do not come at the expense of
pleasing (emotional) design. Sustainability and sustainable design practices
will also help us ensure the long-term availability and growth of our digital
artifacts.
- Investigate Theory and Applied Production: Throughout
the course, we will work to establish a meaningful relationship between
production work and various brands of theory (rhetoric, design, technology),
with the goal of expanding and improving theory and production in our own
work and in discussions across technical communication and other interested
disciplines.
Routine Class Activities
- del.icio.us account: Largely an information sharing/digital
show-and-tell activity, you will maintain a del.icio.us account for at
least the purposes of bookmarking sites and resources that you believe
would be of interest to others in COM 530. You’ll tag such sites with “com530,”
and the feed from your “com530”-tagged sites will be aggregated at our
course web site (3 randomly-selected ones on the main
page, and on a page of all the feeds from
all course members). [Note: if you already maintain an account on another
social bookmarking site, such as Ma.gnolia.com, you can probably use that
account instead. Please see me.] Because you will (or should!) be looking
at a lot of materials on the Web, I expect your account to be active—especially
your “com530” feed. (Hint: a tag like “design-inspiration” for sites you
find inspiring can be a nice addition to your del.icio.us account, too.)
We will be setting up del.icio.us accounts the first night of class.
- Sketch/mood book (paper and digital): Primarily intended
to aid you in visual design, you should keep a sketch/mood book in the
bound, blank sketchbook required from class. Sketch and draw, of course,
but also clip from magazines, etc. The digital version can take any form
you like, from a Web-based collection of materials that you control on
your own site to a Flickr account
(keep copyrighted images private, though)—the main idea is that you can
add to your digital collection and access it from anywhere.
Grading Breakdown
Grading breakdown for COM 530, Fall 2007.
| Course Component |
Value |
| Project One |
30pts |
| Project Two |
30pts |
| Smaller Assignments (10 × 2pts) |
20pts |
| Participation (discussions, del.icio.us) |
20pts |
| TOTAL |
100pts |
Attendance and Participation
Your attendance and active participation are required both for your success
in the class, and for the success of the class as a whole. However, if you
absolutely must miss, please contact me ahead of time via phone or email.
Academic Honesty
As with any course at IIT, you are expected to uphold the Code
of Academic Honesty. In short, all work should be your own, including
visual design and computer code. Summarizations, quotations, the use of
open source code libraries, and any images not of your own making should
be clearly cited as legally and ethically warranted and rhetorically appropriate
for the Web (see, e.g., the <head> area of this document).
Special Needs Statement
Students who have any difficulty (either permanent or temporary) that might
affect their ability to perform in class should contact me privately, either
in person or via email, at the start of the semester. Methods, materials,
or testing will be adapted as required for equitable participation.