What’s next?

Over the last week I’ve got emails from students telling me the course it going to fast, other ones telling me that the class is going too slow. I have had one student tell me that the course is too commercial, and one tell me that it’s not commercial enough, and a couple of people asking about how far behind the schedule we are with the course program. Accordingly I’m going to dedicate the first portion of the class this week discussing course content with the class. Bring your questions, your suggestions, and your willingness to speak along!

Getting animated

Thanks to pee nui for this happy snap

A prodding and pulling webpages until they twitch.

Assessment #1

For this first assessment , your task will be to enhance a text using hypertext techniques. That is, to take a bit of plain old english text, and use the techniques we’ve learnt in class thus far to make it more engaging, more informative – or just plain prettier. Annotate it with links, add javascript animations, have extra information appear when you mouseover – or illustrate it with diagrams. You can be as creative or as simple as you want with this one.

friendfeed update

Some quick notes about the friendfeed group.

1. Right now it’s private, but the moment the course is over and I can abdicate responsibility for keeping it free from spam and cheating, I’ll be opening it up so that you can keep referring to it long after you’ve forgotten your password. Bear that in mind!
2. You’ll probably find it a lot more useful if you set it up to email or message you when someone posts new content, but fiddling with the “email/IM” options on the group feed. I’m subscribed for updates, and can answer questions about specific links for you there.
   

DOM or <sub>?

Decorating your bare HTML pages.

I’m not sure how far we’ll get today; this is a tricky bit of subject matter, and probably the most complex that we will deal with in the course. Don’t be afraid if it doesn’t all make sense straight away; there will be time to kick it all off.

Mashups, and the web of data

an image from Kirsty Boyle's excellent girltron project

What on earth is a mashup? I don’t mean mashup in the media-sampling sense of DJ Earworm or Soda Jerk, but rather in the Web sense:
a mashup is a combination of two separate data sources available on the web, into some service or data set. Like the sampling sort of mashup, web mashups tend to be particularly valuable if their are surprising or subversive – but just plain useful is also good.

A short prehistory of everything

The diagram above is the first map of the internet. Through three universities/research centres in California to a fourth in Utah. It was scrawled in 1969. The social nature of the network (initially thought of as a way to distribute computational jobs remotely) became evident with the unexpected popularity of email. The first test message was sent in 1971 and by 1973 email made up the majority of network traffic.

Welcome to netcultures.

What are we here for?

In this subject, students engage with the diversity of cultures and practices on the Internet, and with the concepts and techniques involved in Internet website development.

Through lectures, tutorials, workshops and production exercises, students explore a range of websites and online communities, and gain core technical skills in website production.

These include production skills for animation, streaming media and publishing for the Internet. Students work individually or in groups to develop a small website.

Got that?

I’m your lecturer for the duration, and my name is Dan MacKinlay. Contact me at netcultures [at] email [dot] possumpalace [dot] org with all your questions.

You will also want to check out our friendfeed group, or I’ll dock ya marks.

the citizens of the web and their languages

This week was quite technically oriented. We’ll be returnng to the technical and aesthetic background of what we do here in later weeks, bur first of all: a quick introduction to the skills (and what is almost the same thing, the vocabulary) that will be neccessary for assessment.