Assignments

Writing Assignments | Coding Assignments | Design Assignments

Please check this page and our Schedule regularly. Both pages will be updated as the term progresses.

Grading

This course is as much about the proces of writing for electronic media as it is about the product. We'll do a large number of mostly short assignments (on day one, we'll complete three assignments!) that feed into the major projects. 25% of your final grade is tied to your completion of these smaller assignments, making the daily assignments the single most important part of your course grade.

This course is portfolio-based, which means that at the end of the term you will submit a complete, electronic portfolio of your work. You will be evaluated on the complete portfolio. This works to your advantage and enables me to chart your development over the term. While I will evaluate your work as we proceed, having a portfolio due at the end enables you to revise and update as you learn more and receive feedback. Each assignment will contribute to your portfolio, even though you will not submit every individual assignment to me or include it as a sample in your portfolio.

Major course elements and their weight:
10% - Personal Weblog (Blog)
15% - Final Personal Website/Portfolio
15% - Attendance & Participation (including collaboration with peers!)
15% - Hand Coded Personal Website
20% - Major Web Development Project
25% - Daily Assignments and Course Weblog

On our way to completing the three major projects (a Hand Coded Personal Website, a Web Development Project, and a Final Portfolio), we'll complete a series of Daily Assignments broken down into three categories: writing, coding, and design. This distinction, while admittedly artificial, will help us identify different elements to writing for electronic media.

The Writing Assignments generally require us to write, informally in our personal blogs, semi-formally in the course blog or to prepare draft text for our websites, or formally as we rethink and revise the text we'll publish to the web.

The Coding Assignments, as we'll quickly discover, bleed into both writing and design categories. When we code (X)HTML for a webpage, we are engaged in both writing and design. But we'll attempt to maintain some separation here. Generally, if we're working with HTML or CSS code I'll call it a coding assignment.

The Design Assignments encompass both technical issues (generating images for use on the web, for example) and more creative matters, such as a storyboard drawing of a potential webpage.

Together, these assignments (some to be done in class, and others as homework) will feed directly into your major projects for the course.