Writing Online

Here’s a video that we can add to our class discussion for Tuesday. It was made several years ago and it presents a science fiction style “history” of the Internet. The creators have an updated version, Epic 2015, that extends the “history.” You can view them both here.

There are copies up on YouTube that I could have provided here, but the video quality is pretty poor so you’ll have to go the website

I have made the daily schedule of readings, homework, and project due dates available at the bottom of the “assignments” page. Right now there are some gaps in the schedule during the second half of the semester to leave room for topics of discussion that we decide upon as a class, so if you read an interesting article or hear a good news story about writing/communication in online spaces, please pass it along to me and we’ll add it to the list of readings.

I have also created a “Readings” page that provides access to all our online readings for the course. Right now you can find the links to the readings for next Tuesday’s class discussion. To find the page, click on the “Links” page and then look for an additional link to the readings page in the left-hand column menu.

Final note: I’ll be adding the schedule to the Writing Studio calendar in the morning.

More later…

As promised, here are all the videos we talked about or viewed in class today. Take a closer look at the the text in “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” especially if you are just learning the differences between HTML (the code used to create traditional web pages) and CSS and XML (code that allows you to create sites that use templates and pull “content” into it from a database).

And, let me say that I am a true novice when it comes to using any computer code, so don’t feel like you have to know how to code anything by hand. That’s why in class I demonstrated how to cut and paste the “embed” code right from the YouTube site into a blog. The embed code for the video is a little complicated, but it essentially follows the same formula as this code for embedding an audio file in a blog post:

The part in red is the web address for the audio file. If you typed the part in red into a browser (Explorer, Firefox, etc.) it would take you directly to the audio file where I have it stored, and it would look like this:

The part in blue indicates how high and wide to make the audio player. If I set the sizes too small you wouldn’t be able to see all the control buttons. The last part of the code in blue, “autoplay=false,” tells the browser loading the blog not to play the audio automatically, but to wait for the user to click the play button. The code in green that surrounds all the other information is the actual “embed tag.” This information tells the browser what it should do with the information in the middle–that is, embed the audio file in the blog post.

See, coding can be simple and fun! Now back to those videos I promised:

This is “The Machine is Us/ing Us”

Here is the original “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama” video that we watched in class.

This is “Obama Girl” at the Democratic YouTube debate. If you are unfamiliar with this debate, it was a debate where the questions were asked by citizens who videotaped their questions and posted them on YouTube. You can read more about it here and you can watch video of the actual debate at YouTube.

Now go to our forums at the Writing Studio to post your follow up to the videos and our class discussion. (Note: I’ve spent so much time putting together this blog post that I’m going to wait till tomorrow morning to set up the forum space. So, if you are reading this Thursday evening, check the Writing Studio sometime after noon tomorrow.)

Hello all! The course blog is now up-to-date.

I will use the main page here to post updates and thoughts about the course and you are invited to post comments and questions to any of my posts. Also, throughout the semester I will propagate the “Links” page with readings and resources for class discussion and assignments. We are a group with diverse interests and knowledge, and I’m looking forward to getting to know you all better and to learning from you.