Syllabus

Course objectives
The World Wide Web gives us wonderful new ways to tell stories, but it demands new skills. Thinking in interactive and multimedia terms is both fun and challenging. While most adults have a lifetime of exposure to print, radio and TV, the art of interactive storytelling with new media is little more than a decade old. Today’s online journalism has taken only baby steps. You’ll be the first generation to take this toddler and shape its future!

This is a beginning course in producing websites. To succeed in this class, you must bring to it basic web-surfing skills, journalistic writing and a willingness to work hard. Online work is very demanding, but it’ll pay you back in satisfaction ten-fold. Just decide that you’ll be a little short on sleep and high on adrenaline this semester, and you’ll be rewarded with an extraordinary amount of fun and satisfaction that comes from creating websites.

Kelly KarnesExtra effort will pay off in fun and the satisfaction of creating websites.

Planning, designing and producing websites calls for skills that can take years to hone and polish: This course is a first step in the process of thinking about the message and intent of your site and then building it accordingly. If all goes well, by the end of the semester you should be able to:
• critically examine websites and recognize excellence as well as mediocrity
• develop ideas for original, compelling stories that use interactivity and multimedia
• think in new ways of nonlinear and multilinear storytelling
• plan and storyboard a website
• design effective site navigation as well as individual pages
• gather and/or produce multimedia assets (text, graphics, photos, video, audio)
• report, write and edit online stories
• use basic HTML, Photoshop and Dreamweaver
• produce, trouble-shoot and upload web pages
• understand copyright, fair use, legal and ethical issues facing online journalists

In today’s journalism world you need
• to be able to create and produce storytelling in whatever format is most appropriate.
• to master technical skills as well as journalism skills
• to understand what the technology can do
• to be as comfortable writing a text story as with recording audio to accompany a web presentation.

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