so you want to be a web author?

This semester I've been teaching a new bachelor course called "Multimodal Design (Web design)." Multimodal means multimedia, but we've been reading Kress and van Leeuwen's Multimodal Discourse, hence the term. The main book, however, was Gregory Ulmer's Internet Invention.

Internet Invention is a text book about web design, but it has nothing on HTML, servers, or Photoshop. Instead, it is a mini-reader of selected theories of image, narrative, poetics and modern culture, and a set of interesting assignments. (It's a tough read for a bachelor student, though, and many students told me they hated the book.)

Reading Ulmer, you understand that a web author must know how to write. He or she should master narrative, exposition, argument, and, above all in electronic media, description.

A web author must understand imagery and how to use it. (Here, I would like to add video and sound.)

And, of course, he or she must know the basics of code and how the net works.

At the end of the semester, about 80 of my 105 students took the exam, by handing in the URL of a "wide site," a web site about themselves and the ideologies of the society they live in. And I think Ulmer is right: to succeed, you need to know how to write, to illustrate, and to code. Very few students master more than two of these skills. The fancy coders who know the JavaScript tricks and insist that they need to use a PHP and Flash combo are rarely able to write a decent paragraph of text.

Still, I am happy to see that most of the student sites I've seen became much better than what I thought a beginner could accomplish in seven weeks of full-time work.

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