Welcome to English 313

Welcome to English 313: Computers in the Study of English. This introductory post will help you get your bearings on the class website and find the resources you’ll need to succeed in this course.

Course Overview

The primary objective of this course is to teach you to build effective professional websites using standards compliant XHTML and CSS code. It’s OK if you have no idea what the phrase “standards compliant” means, or if acronyms like XHTML and CSS intimidate you–the syllabus for this course assumes that you have never created a website before. On the other hand, if you eat, sleep, and breathe code, this course has something to offer you, too–we’ll be spending a significant amount of time writing, both for the web and about the web. In addition to creating websites with code, you’ll create a lot of documents: proposals, usability reports, blog entries, abstracts, and so on. Along the way, we’ll take a close look at the way writing on the web has changed in the last ten years, giving you the opportunity to decide what type of online identity you want to craft for yourself.

Getting Started

We will hit the ground running during the first week of class, so you’ll need to complete the following tasks before Thursday:

• Purchase your textbooks. If you don’t have them already, you need to buy the following two books: HTML, XHTML, and CSS: Visual Quickstart Guide (6th Edition, ISBN: 0321430840), by Elizabeth Castro, and Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition, ISBN: 0321344758), by Steve Krug.
• Get a flash drive. You will need a reliable flash drive (preferably 4 GB or larger) to store your projects for this course. If you want to use the drive for other things, that’s fine, but the drive needs to be formatted to work on both Mac and PC platforms.
• Create an account on the class website.
• Create a blog at WordPress.com. It doesn’t matter what you title your blog or what email address you use to create it; you just need a place to start writing. (Note: you will be sharing your blog with everyone in this class, so make sure you are comfortable with what you do there.) When you have set up your WordPress blog, add a comment to this blog entry with the URL of your new site.

If you have any questions about any of these items, don’t hesitate to contact me.