I'm glad I got everyone's attention.
I started out with a question for the class, because I wanted to know what everyone thought. How do you see our final publication in your mind? Do you have a visual picture or a diagram of our page in your head? I wanted to see if anyone had thought of how the overall look and feel is going to be.
I don't want to tell everyone how to make their page or what they should write about, Mick would have done that if he wanted us to do that. But, Mick isn't goning to cut and paste to make our page a presentation at the end of the semester.
Face it we want this page to be professional, and look great. There will be many people looking at this in the future. The next class will be required to read it. Many other classes around the country and throughout the world will be very interested to see what the RPI students came up with. We ARE going to set a precedent. My question is, how are we going to go about it, and how good do we want to look. Think of it as an interview. Are you going to go into that interview unprepared?
This page will be of great use to reference in the future. You might want to direct future employers there- you want it to look professional. If you want to put on your resume that you are literate in HTML and you have published a colaberative webpage for a class called writing to the WWW, you are going to need to document that, and prove it by showing it.
This is our chance to show off, set a precedent, do something fun, creative and exciting. Something that people will look at again and again, something that will last, endure the ages. Can we do it? Are we up to it? You tell me.
I don't want to be in charge or take anything away from anyone, I just want to make everyone aware that we need an overall goal. What are we going to call it? A textbook, a journal? Will there be a final grand opening at the end of our semester, will we unveil it?
Will we be proud of it?
Let's not do something that has been done before, lets add some fresh new ideas and incourage creativity and freedom within our WHATEVER it is.
I want to raise the questions now, not when it's too late.
I think we need to come up with an idea of who the audience is, why they should read it and why anybody else should care.
Please comment- this is only a start
This is an opportunity for everyone to choose and elaborate on their specialty. Use this to your advantage, and show off what you know, what you've learned. Make it something that you are proud of, something that you will want to look back at and know that you were a part of something that was worthwhile.
No one person alone can do this task, but maybe with everyone's input we can find a common ground, so we can start to join it together. Maybe I can help to define the audience or write about why we are doing this, other than the fact that it was assigned. Maybe I can help to make it look interesting, or structure the way we want our visitors to travel through it. Do we want high control, low control, table of contents, links in text, What is it going to look like?
I think that if we come up with a structure now, it will be a whole lot easier later on when we want to tie it all together.
Or I can just shup-up and do my node on why my classmates hate me.
Sonia