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I'm not teaching dreamweaver as a module. It just gets used where appropriate, to do a job. It won't be used next year, But this year, with a lot of handholding, it does,
In that sense I think their is a danger that dreamweaver can be a bit of straw man in the debate. A bit of a totem to represent web 1 when we are all supposed to be web 3.
The truth is that any software can be as complex or as simple as you want to make it. I know there are parts of word I will never use and I think I had my first flying arrow in Powerpoint this week. They can do loads but . I use as appropriate.
Ultimately it's what works. As I say to my students, Use Dreamweaver, use word, use wordpress and save the page; use a hammer and some nails if you can get it to work on IE, However you do it. Just do it.
I think their is a danger that dreamweaver can be a bit of straw man in the debate. A bit of a totem to represent web 1 when we are all supposed to be web 3.
True. Both my experience and the example that Amy Gahran used in the post that started this were of courses where Dreamweaver was more or less the only thing taught about online journalism.
We encourage journalism students to study web design (Dreamweaver, accessibility, usability, etc.) alongside their core modules in the first year - but they don't have to.
And they don't have to know Dreamweaver to do the second year Online Journalism module - instead they learn CMS and some basic HTML. Even when I didn't have a CMS to teach them I created a bunch of templates so they only had to fill the boxes.
IN the final year all students have to study a module from another production area to complement their core specialism. Azeem is studying web alongside journalism - which is where he learned PHP. TV students on the same module looked at VOD.
The whole debate is best illustrated by the following: my best online journalism student has had to switch from the specialist Journalism degree to the broad media degree, as it is the only way he was going to be able to study areas such as digital cultures and Flash.
Really interesting debate. I' m responsible for a unit in online journalism at Solent University. I ditched teaching Dreamweaver for many of the reasons you describe in your post. We now create a single news site using Joomla!. Students also blog on Wordpress.
The outcome has been really good. Students don't spend hours and hours creating pretty looking buttons in Fireworks and Photoshop. Instead, they get more of the online editorial skills, video and content management.
In an ideal world, we would offer a bit of web design. But contrary to what those journalism degrees cynics would have you believe, we're not exactly short of things to teach our students.
If we spend time teaching web design, innevitably the students get less of something else, which is also probably really important. We're particularly aware of this because we're currently going through the process of updating the entire journalism undergrad course.
I'm not sure if we're quite there yet, but the aim is to have convergence at the 'heart' of the degree. We want to get our students thinking intellectually about it what it means and also have the practical skills to use in the newsroom. Our students also won't be compelled to take NCTJ exams, although we'll still offer them.
It's an exciting time, even though I am not really "excited" by the fact that I'm spending all this weekend drafting a load of new unit content. Wish me luck!
Just one small thing, I really don't see the point of Twitter. If anyone can "theorise" the significance of twitter to journalists, then please let me know. Answers on a postcard, preferably to arrive by first thing Monday!
Here is an (not particularly creative I have to admit but it will do) example
...this post from Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame reminded me that there is a fine text editor built into Dreamweaver, which, used properly, will yield the good clean semantic code that the cool kids all advocate these days.
Then again, there are plenty of free or cheap text editors around that get the job done with enough spending money leftover to buy a Dan Cederholm or Jeffrey Zeldman book that will take you further than any piece of software.
To drive the point home: It's one thing to teach a copy editing class how to use proofreader's marks; it's quite another to point them in the direction of Copperud and Bernstein.
Teaching software instead of underlying principles is like teaching a monkey to press a red button when he is hungry. Move the monkey to cage where the banana machine uses a blue button, and the monkey goes hungry...