Critically engaged
This semester I am teaching 2 sections of MDST110, the introductory digital methods class for the competitive Media Studies major. My friend Jim Cocola, the Wikipedian publisher of Mirador Press, has convinced me of the efficacy of teaching media studies courses with wikis. So we set up a wiki for the hundred strong MDST110 class and the program to build resources and the community.
We considered using the internal collaboration system called SAKAI that the University of Virginia has decided to implement as part of the internal myUVA rollout for faculty, students, and staff. The two biggest problems with SAKAI are that the information remains private and advocating use of the SAKAI system (the Media Studies program would be one of the early adopters) does not give our potential majors experience with the real, messy world of cybercitizenship. We ultimately felt that a Media Wiki was a better fit; now it’s their turn to take ownership. I’m hoping one of the majors or potential majors will step up and start a Free Culture chapter on campus; Lawrence Lessig’s book is our text this week.
Writing with the wiki has a gentle learning curve, gentler still after their course work so far this semester creating xhtml pages and css files. I wanted the Media Studies Program’s site to match the new wiki logotype, and when I went in to add a link from the site to the wiki, I discovered terrible code. The site was in XHTML 1.0 Strict. It validated (mostly). But it wasn’t semantically correct. This is a slippery concept to attempt in the classroom; the sloppy code works, looks like what the student wants in the browser, but it simply isn’t correct. I replaced the break tags with unordered lists full of list items with classes (plenty of css muscle) and corrected the div structure so the faked float really floats. The new code helped teaching percentage widths in class last week, and the new design reflects the colors of print conventions.
Leave a Reply
Posted Tuesday, September 26th, 2006, 10:52 am | Filed in Design, Pedagogy. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
