homepage_instruction

Introduction to Literature, Spring, 1998 A: What else can we do to make our course more interactive, and the English Literature Databank Our Databank? B: Why not develop your talent and save something in our English Literature Databank? Why not have fun matching colors, images with your great ideas?

B: Right!

Make a Homepage on

an Author, a Literary Genre, or an Issue.

[Detailed explanation of Purposes for this activity]

:( A: But how? :( B: Don't panic. Please read the following step-by-step instructions

Goals, Requirements & Examples	Step One: Journal Writing	Rules
Step Two: Group Work	How much time do you need? Is making a homepage difficult?	Step Three: Making/Designing your Homepage

Purposes

To make literary analysis more interesting and lively with interaction, inter-connection (hyperlinks), & visual aids:

One of the purposes of Introduction to Literature is to help you understand literary works and express your ideas about them in an organized and professional way. For us non-native speakers, however, writing about English Literature in English can be difficult. That's why we have journal-writing as a requirement last semester (Fall, 1997), some of which are saved in our databank.

To make the task of thinking and writing about literature more interesting, active and interactive, we ask you to make a homepage and report on it to the whole class. It should be:

interesting because you can use the visual aspects of the homepage (e.g. colors, pictures, design) to express yourselves;
active and interactive because you as a group will need to work out a schedule and discuss a lot about your writings. And then when the work is done, you need to explain it to the whole class, which, in turn, will be responded by your classmates and teacher right away or later. Your involvement should be active and responsible also because making a homepage is a form of publication.

[In our department, you can expect a lot of group work (for instance, making a magazine in the sophomore year). We hope that you can also learn from this project how to work with others.]

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1. Specific Goal and Requirements

Final product: A homepage with four to five inter-linked pages (which can be some entries from your journals) written by some or all the 5 to 7 members of a group.
Focus: This homepage needs a focus, which can be an author, a literary genre (e.g. dramatic monologue), or an topic/issue (e.g. how are women treated in love poetry?). Please look at our leading questions for specific suggestions. You can onsider the wild-association questions, but you must include the literary texts we deal with in class.
The main page of the homepage should show the structure or outline of the whole project; the other pages should be linked with the main page, and with each other.

Example of Students' Homepages

The Bicycle Thief and Icicle Thief

Tennessee Williams

http://www2.uncwil.edu/english/newlin/224/tennessee/menu.htm

As you can see from these two sites, as well as several sites you visited last semester, "writings," including students', on the web can help the readers a lot. Bear in mind, however, that these two sites are both constructed by students of the junior year or above. We ask you to look up to them as a model, but we will not evaluate your products from the same standard.

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Step One: JOURNAL WRITING-- What you are aleady capable of and have been doing.
The major difference is that, if you know the topic of your homepage before you do the writing, you can go ahead and do the writing in HTML format (e.g. using Netscape editor to write). If that is the case, then you can include pictures and links at this early stage of writing. Another case is to turn the (Word) document file into HTML file, which is very easy, too.

See the journal page in the English Literature Databank
(An example of what the other college students did: on-line discussion from a class in U. of Texas at Austin )

Step Two: GROUP WORK-- What you need to learn and do

Coorporate with others: Team work is important for the homepage assignment, from deciding on your focus, to dividing up your job, to finally putting different pieces together and designing the homepage.

One suggestion for job division: in a group of 5-7 , designate one person to be in charge of the main page, and one, the design, and the rest of the group members do the writing and linking of different pages. Definitely you shouldn't leave all the design and structuring work to the two responsible for the main page and the design; they are responsible for initiating the work, collecting ideas and concluding the work. Just because of this, the designer and structurer will be given extra credits if they do a good job.

Surfing for other examples of homepages design, good pictures and background to use. (While collecting materials, don't just save it on a diskette or your hard disk. Remember to open a blank HTML page as your working page to put all the pictures you have saved on and write down the source and date of the work cited. (See format for .

Structuring and sorting: Organizing not only your own ideas and pictures but also your groupmates' can be diffficult. You need to have a good sense of logic and you need to compromise sometimes. Most importanly, you need to first understand what the others have to say and try to incorporate all ideas into a common structure.

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Step Three: MAKING & DESIGNING YOUR HOMEPAGE --Are you excited about it or afraid of it?

Making HTML file: You should do it for your own writing; just convert the document file to HTLM file and put in the pictures you want. Do not give background or do color combination yet, since the design of each page needs to be consistent with the main page. However, you can collect some backgrounds for the whole group to use.
Design: This should be the fun part! Once you have collected enough writings, pictures, backgrounds, and decided on a structure, you have everything on your pallete and you can freely develop your creativity.

Is making a homepage difficult?
No, it is just another kind of word-processing which allow images. However, we do understand that some of you are still alergic to computers and anything new takes time to get used to. We, therefore, ask for a group work but not individual work, and, more importantly, we will make our assisstants available for you to ask questions. Also, in case you gorget about some commands, we have a simplified guide on our Iinternet-Course main page. (The guide, by the way, has an easily remembered address: http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/html/html.htm)

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5. How much time do you need? Suggested Schedule:

Week I	The month before the report time	10 days before the report time	3 days before the report time
Step I	Step II	Step III	Step IV
Forming a group and discuss a possible topic, author or date to report on.	Divide up your job and work out a specific schedule for this working month.	Meet to hand in all the materials to the designer, and discuss possible ways of design.	Meet to look at the final product and discuss how you want to present it to the whole class.

Rules 1. Be committed. Don't try to sit back and earn grades from the others' hard work. We don't want to create enemies among you, but to be fair to all the students, you should report to us if some do not help or show up in your meetings.
Rules 2. Don't plagiarize; remember to cite your sources.
Since not all of you know about formal research writing or citation, we ask you to at least take down
1) the name of the writer (if you can find it); 2) the site title (if you can find it), 3) the site address, 4) the date of access (the date when you get it).
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The following is a simplified version of citation of Web materials for your reference:
MLA-Style Citations of Electronic Source (from http://www2.uncwil.edu/people/newlink/490/mla.htm)
The basic components:

Author's Lastname, Author's Firstname. "Title of

Document."

applicable). Version or File Number, if applicable.

Document date or date of last revision (if

different from access date). Protocol and

address, access path or directories (date of

access).

Examples:
WWW:
Burka, Lauren P. "A Hypertext History of Multi-User

Dimensions." The MUDdex. 1993.

http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/lpb/muddex/essay/

(5 Dec. 1994).

E-Mail or Listserv:
Bruckman, Amy S. "MOOSE Crossing Proposal."

mediamoo@media. mit.edu (20 Dec. 1994).

Thomson, Barry. "Virtual Reality." Personal e-mail (25 Jan.

1995).

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