Proposals

Instructional Technology Conference 2009

Title: New Media Education with Online Tools

Name: Jason Caudill, Loretta Noles

Audience: All

Audience Level: All

Length: 2 Hours

Abstract: New media is playing a role in the way students connect with one another and the ways in which they seek and find employment and other opportunities. Traditionally, creating and managing web sites took a certain amount of technical savvy. Today, however, new media options have made it much easier to create and manage multimedia websites. Participants in this session will get to work hands-on with this new technology.

Description: Those of us who started careers in technology or took part in technology classes as recently as just a couple of years ago can probably remember sitting down, opening Notepad or an equivalent text editor, and typing HTML code to create a web page. Past that experience we may have used a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor to create pages graphically. Either way, there was a significantly steep learning curve to creating pages, creating links, and understanding details like relative references and the formatting of e-mail links.

Once the pages were created we then moved on to learning about online file management. Placement of pages, naming the default start page "default"; or "index";, and setting up dedicated image folders were just a few of the issues to learn about and manage. For those unlucky few working without some kind of file transfer protocol (FTP) server, this all had to be accomplished in less than user friendly online file managers.

As new media becomes more and more pervasive the question for colleges and universities is how to get students online and available without making every student work through a dedicated web design course. It is important to note here that in the proper context dedicated, advanced courses in web design are entirely appropriate, but for many students they need to get online in a basic way, not become experts in web design or ecommerce.

Online web design interfaces, coupled with free web hosting and media hosting sites, can be the solution to this problem. This presentation will focus on the solutions provided by Google, integrating Google Sites, Picasa, and YouTube. The presenters incorporate these tools into an interdisciplinary, introductory technology course and can, in under two weeks of class time, take students who have never posted a web page to having multi-page web sites and online photo galleries.

This presentation will take participants through the process of setting up, configuring, and publishing a fully functional web site through Google Sites, embedding video into the site, and linking to an online photo gallery.

Session Type: Interactive Workshop

On-Site Equipment Requirements: Windows computers for the presenter and all participants with install privileges for user accounts will be required. A digital projector connected to the instructor's machine will also be required.

Contact Information/Affiliation:
Jason Caudill
Assistant Professor of Business
Carson-Newman College
2130 Branner Ave.
C-N Box 71887
Jefferson City, TN 37760
jason@jasoncaudill.com

Loretta Noles
Director of Online & Distance Learning
Carson-Newman College
2130 Branner Ave.
C-N Box 71883
Jefferson City, TN 37760
lnoles@cn.edu