Course Objectives

This course will focus on the design of educational multimedia for libraries and media centers. The objectives of the course include

• To facilitate an understanding of how to create and design user-centered, instructional multimedia.
• To provide hands-on experience in multimedia production, including digitization of images, sounds, animation and video, and hypertext authoring.

Organization of the Course

Major Assignments

1. Exercises

• Please email the instructor the URL of a finished exercise.
• Exercises are due on the Week noted on the course schedule.
• Late exercises will not be accepted (no exceptions). It is your responsibility to make sure that the instructor has received your exercise on the due date.
• Exercises can be resubmitted by addressing Feedback Receiced to Improve Score (provided you submitted the exercise on time and made a valiant effort).

Exercise 1

• Write a detailed evaluation of a website of your choice. Choose a site that could serve as a model and/or contain relevant information for your Term Project.
• Use the evaluation template used in class and address all questions.
  Incorporate your own insights and provide specific examples that you understand the issues addressed by each question (if possible incorporate captured screenshots and hyperlinks to the specific parts of the website in your evaluation).
• Download the Exercise 1 Checklist slides.
• Publish your evaluation as a set of web pages.
  Create a title page that contains a brief summary of your evaluation and a hyperlink to the site's home page you are evaluating as well as lists of the evaluation questions, which are hyperlinked to your specific answer pages.
• Upload | FTP your pages to your Rutgers account and submit the URL of the summary page in the dropbox assigned to the exercise.

Exercise 2

• Create a draft of your site "Why be a Librarian in the 21st Century?" in outline form.
• Your site draft needs to cover your vision of the "value" and "skills" of a "Librarian in the 21st Century" as well as provide an outline of your relevant interests and passions.
• Break down your site into categories. Create organization and associated file hierarchy. Make sure to have a category about you.
• Each of your web page needs to contain your primary navigation structure.
• Each web page has a clear layout and visual hierarchy (and reflecting what have learned so far: margins, typography etc.).
• Each page has a brief sentence describing its goal and an outline of ideas to be covered or linked to. Wherever possible create the local hyperlinks to other pages that expand an idea mentioned.
• Create a page with at least three links to web sites relevant in terms of content and/or whose layout you want to emulate.
• Create at least one web page that contains a table, where at least three cells contain an image.
• Upload | FTP your draft site to your Rutgers account and submit the URL of the home page in the dropbox assigned to the exercise.

Exercise 3

• Create two different grid layouts that visualize concepts related to your Term Project and the question "Why be a Librarian in the 21st Century?"
• Ask yourself: What are the key ideas of my Term Project? and how could I visualize them?
• Please create layouts that have a differentiated visual structure and tell your story in detail.
• You are responsible for finding or creating the digital images.
• The two layout pages you create can be "stand alone" for now: they do not yet need to be connected your main site; and they do NOT require a navigation structure.
• Requirements:
  1) One of your layouts needs to contain at least ONE ANIMATED GIF.
  2) One of your layouts needs to contain at least THREE images.
• Your layouts can contain more animated GIFs and/or images.
  When creating the animated GIF, introduce "pauses" by displaying certain frames longer than others. You can open some the animated GIFs used in class in Fireworks or ImageReady to examine them (e.g. "dancebutton").
• Please create a "summary" page with hyperlinks to the two layout pages.
  On the summary page explain briefly what each layout is meant to communicate.
• Upload | FTP your work to your Rutgers account and submit the URL of the summary page for the layouts in the dropbox assigned to the exercise.

Exercise 4

• Convert your primary navigation structure so that it uses "navigation bars" and/or "rollover images" or "Flash Buttons" using Dreamweaver.
• Create a consistent "look & feel" for your pages in terms of primary (and secondary) navigation as well as choice of type face and size.
• Test your Dreamweaver site and submit the URL of the summary page in the dropbox assigned to the exercise.

Exercise 5

• Create two Flash animations that visualize concepts related to your Term Project and the question "Why be a Librarian in the 21st Century?".
• Ask yourself: What are the key ideas of my Term Project? and how could I visualize them?
• Please create animations that use animated text and images and tell your story in detail and embed each Flash animation in a separate web page.
• Please create a "summary" page with hyperlinks to the two animations.
  On the summary page explain briefly what each animation is meant to communicate.
• Upload | FTP your work to your Rutgers account and submit the URL of the summary page in the dropbox assigned to the exercise.

2. Term project

• Create a website that communicates your vision of "Why be a Librarian in the 21st Century?"
• Build a cool site you can use as your calling card in your job search.
• Demonstrate your technology and media savvy - use text, images, animations effectively.
• Demonstrate your understanding of lecture materials and class discussions.
• All students will anonymously evaluate each others website to select the top six sites; the student evaluations will not determine or affect the final grade.
  The top six sites may be featured on the SC&I website and possibly at conferences.
• Evaluation criteria
  1. Mechanics (50%) - technical competency in web and multimedia design: navigation, layout, animations, access performance.
  2. Meaning (30%) - concise presentation of content and effective use of multimedia.
  3. Creativity (20%)
  (Keep in mind these three criteria are interrelated).

Methods of Assessment

Software

Macromedia Studio 8: Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, etc.

(Educational Price $299 - other sites or Rutgers may have better price)