Day-by-Day

(click on the date below)

July 1

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July 14

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July 20

July 21

July 22

July 23

July 27

July 28

July 29

July 30

Aug. 3

Monday, July 27

Who do you trust? 

Goals for today:

• Evaluating information online
• Design, content and usability
• Introducing the final treasure hunt:
  • Web sites on your topic
  • Business information
  • Government information
  • Hometown information

Assignment

• The Assignment: Treasure Hunt #2
• Begin (or finish!) Section Five of the Treasure hunt.
• Pick two of your favorite Web sites for discussion in class
  • Why do you like them?
  • How did you find them?
  • Who made them, and why?
  • What alternative sources could confirm the information or pose critical questions about it?

Related sites:

• For your treasure hunt...
  • The Assignment: Treasure Hunt #2
  • J50 Government Resources
  • J50 Business Resources
  • Teresa Leonard's Links, especially the "official sources" and "Computer-assisted reporting" sections.
• On usability and information quality
  • Jakob Nielsen on "Usability" of information. (See book, below.)
  • ProjectCool.com for Web design advice (see book reference below).
  • Evaluating Web sites (and information), questions and more questions.
  • Bob and another Bob discussing information quality, (a sample of the kind of old-fashioned Web pages we did in Paul Jones' 1995 class)
• Misc. housekeeping
  • The latest caution on Mac-PC disk problems.

Books for the (August) beach:

• Nielsen, Jakob. Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and beyond. Cambridge, MA: AP Professional, 1995.
  Sun Microcomputer top usability engineer (web site listed above) discusses hypertext technology and strategies for overcoming information overload, both as a provider and consumer of information. He's especially interested in testing and improving the design of information systems. (For related books, try the keywords "human- computer interaction," "user interface design," "usability" and "ergonomics.")

• Martin, Teresa A. and Glenn Davis. The Project Cool Guide to HTML. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
  More than we had time to cover on images, tables, imagemaps, frames, forms and some of the multimedia plug-ins for the Web, but still a relatively basic book with a lot of examples online at ProjectCool.com. Also asks important questions like "Is your cool James Dean cool, or Beavis and Butthead cool?"

So, What Did You Learn Today?