Website Design Sites
2001; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 83; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/003172170108300104
ISSN1940-6487
Autores Tópico(s)Multimedia Communication and Technology
ResumoWRITER'S block is a devilish ailment, and I had a bad case of it when I began writing this column. I spent hours reading such magazines as Wired and MacWorld, surfing the Internet, and otherwise avoiding putting words on paper. While I try to keep each of these columns fairly well focused, in this one I'll be rambling some. But I'll try to stick to the general theme of useful resources for designing Web pages. First, an update on the June column is in order. In the June column, Video: Get with It, I said that I intended to begin to put on my website (www.electronicscholar.com) digital videos that demonstrate expert instructional practices. Several weeks ago, I finally managed to get the first streaming video up and running. If you visit the site, just click on the Study of Teaching Videos link. Then you'll have a choice of broadband or modem. (Unfortunately, with a modem connection, you can't stream video of very good quality, so I had to set the frame rate to just one frame per second.) If you visit, let me know how it works and what you think of the effort so far. Now that I have mastered the technical hurdles, I'll be adding more videos. My purpose in putting these videos on my site is to capture the subtleties of expert practice. To that end, I have included study questions that I hope will focus attention on the intricate ways master teachers practice their craft. Incidentally, my wife Sharon is the teacher in the first video, and she doesn't like my calling the video clip Shared Reading. The term seemed appropriate when the clip was recorded during the spring of 1996, but today I guess people refer to this kind of activity as buddy reading. Preparing the first video was a hassle. It felt like I was playing chess with the technology and losing! Some of my trouble came from my resolve to use only the best possible tools. Long ago I decided that it's easier to learn one great program than to learn to use several programs that do only a few things well. So I chose to learn to use a Media 100 workstation to capture and edit the videos, Terrin's Cleaner Pro to compress the videos and prepare them for streaming, and Macromedia's Dreamweaver 4 to create the Web pages. I quickly developed a love/hate relationship with Dreamweaver. The program is an incredible tool for doing nearly everything, but it doesn't handle QuickTime streaming video well at all. After several long days, I finally figured out - with the help of technician and colleague Joe Lynch - that you have to create a text file with the QuickTime server video file address in it, save the file with a .mov extension, and refer to this file in the html code under the tag of embed. This way, QuickTime, which is smarter than any browser, finds the streaming server (rtsp://) address. This is one of those things that you don't have to know how to do - but you do need to know whom to ask! So that led me to this column, which offers some helpful Internet sites to readers who want to Web pages. While lots of software tools will enable you to technically, none give you expertise in art, graphic design, photography, page layout, or the use of color and typography. So I started surfing to websites that might help readers out on the design part of authoring on the Web. The name Kodak is synonymous with photography, so I went to www.Kodak.com. After poking around a while, I landed at Kodak's Digital Learning Center (DLC) - www.Kodak.com/US/en/digital/dlc/index.jhtml. The DLC is the best free online resource that I have seen on any Internet site! It features a large number of excellent how-to lessons. I was particularly intrigued by the lesson on - for example, cutting out pictures of people and putting them on various background pictures. Check out this tutorial at the DLC: click on Book 1: How To . . . , then Chapter 1, then scroll down to the combining images lesson. …
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