Week 3 – Web Site and Multimedia
Implementation
Objectives
Reading
Training
Individual Project
Learning Team Project
Lecture - Web Design and
Multimedia Implementation
Web Development Software
Discussion Questions
Objectives:
- Examine authoring tools.
- Employ authoring tools to incorporate multimedia
into the existing Web site.
- Describe the process to create audio and video
components.
- Integrate the model for design and development
to refine and expand the layout of the existing web site.
Reading:
Read Chapters 5, 8 & 10 in Multimedia:
Making It Work
Training:
Go to the Projects
page and follow the instructions for going through the tutorials
for Week 3.
Individual Project - Part
1 - Begin to Build Your Website
Overview
of Personal Website Assignment - Week 3 (video)
Learning Team Project – Team
Web site Project, Part 2
Continue to work in your teams on the next part
of the team project.
Check the Calendar for
specific due dates for all assignments, both individual and team.
Lecture - Web Design and Multimedia Development:
Review of Week 2
We covered a lot of information in last week’s reading about
planning and preparation for creating a multimedia instructional
web site or program. We went through the steps of planning and storyboarding
a web site.
This week in the reading, we get into audio and video components
and the considerations necessary in the creation and editing of
these components.
Multimedia Use in Instruction
This week the text talks in depth about audio and video production.
Some of you may already be involved in these types of activities,
and others may be thinking about incorporating these forms of media
into the instruction you design. If you aren’t doing anything
with or thinking about using audio or video, it is still a good
read because it familiarizes you with the process and technical
aspects of media that is a part of our everyday lives. Who hasn’t
listened to audio or watched a video clip on the web? How many of
you have MP3 players?
There are some considerations to think about when trying to decide
what types of media to use in your instructional pieces. In my mind,
the major issue to consider is to not get caught up with using different
types of media just because you can. Only use media when the instruction
calls for it and then only use the media that is appropriate. For
instance, there is no need to have the ‘talking head’
of an instructor on the screen if what the students really need
to see is what the instructor is doing with her hands.
Case in point, when I first started working on the Engineering program
at UTA in 1999, the engineering school had already been in the practice
of video taping all of the professors as they lectured in the classroom,
putting them on videotape, and distributing them to their ‘distance’
students. This was their idea of distance education. The first professor
I worked with already had in mind a model for his course. We would
use the digitized video from these tapes (almost 50 hours worth)
and place it in one corner of the window, then have a ‘talking
head’ in a small window in the upper left corner (dubbing
the audio from the video tapes), with scrollable text of the lecture
in the bottom fourth of the screen.
Take a moment, look at your monitor and imagine this. What is your
reaction?
Since we can really only concentrate on one moving piece on the
screen, how would you decide which window to watch? What’s
the effect on your concentration with three areas of movement on
the screen at the same time? What kind of learning experience does
this provide for you as a student?
I think that they had a couple of reasons for wanting to do it this
way. One, they already had the lectures recorded so they wouldn’t
have to spend any additional time or money to reproduce the lectures,
Two, they really felt that this was the latest and greatest way
of providing a distance learning environment based on a big school’s
model.
Well, fortunately I had the authority to say no, we weren’t
going to use the recorded video because it doesn’t provide
a good experience for the STUDENT. I had already taken two courses
in my masters program by distance and was subjected to this very
environment. Not only is the quality very poor, the professor isn’t
looking into the camera so he isn’t addressing the student
sitting at the computer. When students in the live class ask questions,
they do not have mics so you can’t hear what they asked. Sometimes,
not very often, the professor would remember to repeat the question
before he answered it. Mostly he just answered the question and
it was left to the student watching the video to try to guess what
the question was.
It was the most uneducative experience in my life in terms of the
subject matter (interestingly enough, the course was Instructional
Design!). At the same time it was the most educative experience
because I knew what I would never do to the students I designed
course for or taught online.
For the Engineering program we ended up talking through their content
and what they did in the classroom to teach their content. The electrical
engineering content was particularly challenging because there are
a lot of formulas and equations that use symbols that HTML can’t
display. They also use a lot of diagrams that were related to various
‘parts’ of these equations and needed a way to highlight
the related pieces. We knew that we would design all of these courses
with different types of media. Deciding on the type of media that
was appropriate to the content was a little more challenging.
For most of the electrical engineering courses we used Flash. We
also used Power Point in later courses and converted them to Quick
Time movies. We also used short audio clips on web pages for a couple
of the early Computer Science courses.
The Rest of the Story
For the rest of the story on how we decided on the media for this
program, take a look at my presentation website for the 19th Annual
Distance Teaching and Learning Conference in Madison, WI, on August
13 – 15, 2003 http://www.connectedcreativity.com/eli/Madison/index.htm.
In particular, take a look at the matrix we at CDE created based
on our experiences developing different type of media.
The outcome of this project is that because I could justify the
various uses of media to the professors, I won their trust and respect.
In higher education, this is crucial to the success of a project
like this.
Graphics
There are two types of graphics, vector graphics,
which can be easily manipulated outside of the drawing program,
and rasterized or bitmap graphics, which must be manipulated in
the drawing program before being exported for use. For a good explanation
and illustrations of the two types of graphics go to http://www.123clipart.com/vectrast.html.
It’s always a good idea to save your original
work in the native format so that you can come back to it later
to make adjustments. For instance, if you
are working in Macromedia Fireworks (can create both rasterized
and vector images), if you select ‘Save As’ to save
your file, it will be saved in the .png format and will preserve
the layers you have been working with so that you can easily change
items in the graphic. If you want to convert your final image into
a usable format, you’ll need to export the image as a .gif
or .jpeg. The text discussed how you determine which format to use
for you final graphics. After you have exported the image as a .gif
or .jpeg file, you cannot come back to that file later change it
without extreme difficulty.
You should always work with the highest quality
image when you want to create, change or add to a graphic. A browser
displays at 72 dpi, but you’ll need to work at 300 dpi for
print work, so the best tactic is to create or manipulate at 300
dpi, then compress your final files appropriately for the delivery
method.
Again, always save a copy of your original work!
This is so that can come back to it at a later date and work with
it. I always save my in a folder called ‘Working’ or
‘In Progress”. I’m always surprised how many times
I come back to my original files, not only for the site I originally
created the image for, but many times for a new site I’m working
on.
Web Development Software
You need to
pick a web authoring software this week to continue working
on your web site. You will use the software to continue creating
pages and then upload these files to your server. You can choose
between Mozilla Composer and Macromedia Dreamweaver.
For week three,
use Mozilla Composer, which comes bundled with the
Mozilla browser, and it's free.....permanently. Go to http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/ and
download the Mozilla Suite. After you have installed it, open
it and go to Window > Composer.
You
may NOT use any site builder functions on any of the web hosting
sites. Angelfire, Tripod, Geocities and others will have something
that will say 'create web pages without knowing any HTML'. This
you cannot use. You can use the File Manager functions on these
sites to upload the files you create in Dreamweaver, etc. from your
hard drive to the hosting server.
Next week you can switch to Dreamweaver. Don't
download Dreamweaver this week or the 30 day trial will expire
before this course is completed.
Final Word
A final word about designing and creating websites, or any piece
of instruction: I would encourage you to have multiple people go
through your websites and materials on different types of computers
and in different browsers to check the technical aspects (that all
the graphics display correctly and the links work), to proofread
the text (the typos will jump out at them), and to move through
the site and give you feedback. This is an invaluable step in the
development process.
But what it calls for is that you develop a thick skin! It’s
not easy to have other people discover your mistakes and so easy
to take constructive criticism personally. But wouldn’t you
rather discover these than to let them go and have people who visit
your site have a less than wonderful opinion of you and your company
or institution because there are errors on your site?
So toughen up and ask for reviews!
References:
University of Phoenix (Ed.). (2003). Applications of Multimedia
and Web Page Design [University of Phoenix Custom Edition]. Boston:
Pearson Custom Publishing.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/
www.macromedia.com
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/
Discussion questions:
Check the Calendar
for due dates.
- Select one mode of presentation such a text,
sound, video, etc. and describe its advantages and disadvantages
and considerations for use in a multimedia product.
- When should audio and video be used? What positive
effect can audio and video have on a Web page? What negative effect
can audio and video have on a Web page?
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