Web Teaching Guide: A Practical Approach to Creating Course Web Sites [Paperback]

Sarah Horton (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300087276 | ISBN-13: 978-0300087277 | Publication Date: October 11, 2000 | Edition: 1

Prompted by student enthusiasm and by the opportunity to enhance college courses, more and more faculty members in higher education are incorporating the Web into their teaching. This helpful book is designed to answer the questions an educator who lacks extensive technical experience asks about creating a Web site: Why should I use the Web? How can the Web enhance my teaching? How do I make a Web site? How can I make it effective? Multimedia specialist Sarah Horton draws on extensive experience as a faculty Web consultant to explain the entire process of creating a site, from initial planning through site assessment. She examines the strengths of the Web and its many possible uses. More than just a way to distribute course handouts, a Web site can provide richer content, multiple expressions of an idea, interactivity, opportunities for collaboration and customization, and flexibility for updates. Horton urges teachers to consider the ever-growing possibilities that information technology presents. Her focus is on practical matters related to creating Web-based instructional materials. With case studies throughout, she discusses the planning process, content creation, site development, and finally site implementation in the curriculum.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Horton has written one of the best books I have ever seen on the overall process of Website design . . ." -- Lee Honeycutt, Iowa State University

"This is a valuable guide, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in developing web-based teaching materials. -- Jo Wood, The Times Higher Education Supplement

"Whether . . . to put existing course materials online ... or [for] more ambitious educational endeavor[s] . . . Web Teaching Guide offers a roadmap. -- Elizabeth Greene, The Chronicle of Higher Education

About the Author

Sarah Horton is a multimedia applications specialist at Dartmouth College and the coauthor, with Patrick J. Lynch, of Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites, published by Yale University Press. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1 edition (October 11, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300087276
• ISBN-13: 978-0300087277
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,542,908 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sarah started her career in interaction design in 1991 at the Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media, creating award-winning interactive instructional software. She was an instructional technologist at Darmouth for 11 years before becoming Director of Web Strategy and Design. As Director she led a team of user-experience professionals responsible for web and media design, development, and production. From a strategic perspective she was responsible for planning and developing Dartmouth's digital environment. Sarah left her position at Dartmouth to return to the trenches of accessibility and user experience design. She is currently working on several accessibility audits and usability reviews, and writing.

Sarah is co-author with Patrick Lynch of Web Style Guide, now in its third edition and translated into more than eight languages. She also wrote Web Teaching Guide, which won the American Association of Publishers award for the Best Book in Computer Science in 2000. Her third book, Access by Design, combines the disciplines of universal design, accessibility, and usability into guidelines for designing websites that are universally usable. She is currently working on a book with Whitney Quesenbery called Universal Design for Web Accessibility, to be published in the spring of 2012 by Rosenfeld Media.

Sarah's publication and presentation credits include the New York Times, Peachpit, Boxes and Arrows, and Digital Web Magazine, and the International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (w4a), WebVisions, World Usability Day, and the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory Annual Symposium.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An essential resource for creating Web course sites., December 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Web Teaching Guide: A Practical Approach to Creating Course Web Sites (Paperback)

Horton provides thoughtful, real-world advice for educators who want to create useful and enriching online resources to support their classroom instruction or to create distance education courses. The book is full of detailed, practical advice for creating well-designed and media-rich sites, with a pragmatic eye on the limited resources and technical support available to most teachers. The book includes many examples of educators who created excellent sites without spending a fortune, without lavish amounts of technology, and without a supporting cast of Web design professionals. Best of all, Horton avoids the breathless "revolutionary" boosterism and pretentious rhetoric of most other references for creating online teaching sites. Horton assumes that her audience already knows *how* to teach, and provides a broad overview of the Web technology and techniques useful for K-12 teachers, college professors, and corporate trainers. If you teach on the Web, you need this book.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Concise, well focused guide for teachers, June 14, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Web Teaching Guide: A Practical Approach to Creating Course Web Sites (Paperback)

I really liked this book for its tight focus on the best design and technology methods for creating educational materials for the Web. Ironically, I like Horton's book for the same reason the previous reviewer didn't: it's tightly focused on Web teaching techniques.

I've been teaching for years; I don't need the bloated, wandering discussions of teaching philosophy and academic computing policy issues that clot so many books on teaching and technology. Just give me a clear, concise, thoughtful overview of what's possible on the Web, and *I'll* decide what's best for me and my students. Horton does that--very well.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Sort of, but not quite..., June 4, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Web Teaching Guide: A Practical Approach to Creating Course Web Sites (Paperback)

This book was written Sarah Horton, the co-author of a very (and deservedly so) popular Web Style Guide, and its accompanying website. Unfortunately, unike its predecessor (which still is a 5 star read), this book disappoints. It's not that it is not useful -- it might be for some people -- but it's nowhere near the quality of the previous title. Technical issues add little new material.

A notable, if somewhat surprising, drawback of this book is that it seems to have been written from the perspective of a technology administrator (or "technology specialist", if you prefer), and not a faculty member experienced in teaching in a non-computer-related discipline. It noticeable e.g., in the sections which discuss copyright issues. The author emphasizes the publishers' interests and bottom line, and includes a few tables with restrictive interpretations of "fair use gudelines" (in the form similar to those encouraged by various publishing consortia whose revenue is at stake here). But often there is a difference between what most publishers would like us to, and what the actual letter and intent of the law allows us to do, and, to benefit students and instructors, this fact should be discussed and clearly explained in a book like this (it isn't). There is a rather cursory mention of protecting faculty's own authorship interests in developing the sites, and no specific analysis of existing institutional policies on this issue is included, although they have been widely discussed and often recently adopted at some universities (the mention of those issues on pp. 101-102 is indeed vague). Students' rights to their own work are discussed in mere 12 lines on p. 105. There are other problems. Parts of the book deal with impractical and arcane issues which will require some server management expertise (e.g., using streaming media) or graphic design and programming expertise. It is unlikely that faculty members will need this information (at least in the form in which it is presented), and even less likely they will be able to use it without extensive professional support and very substantial funding.

In summary, for practical advice on how to meaningfully and wisely incorporate technology into college teaching, I much prefer the concise chapter in the "The Chicago Handbook for Teachers" (Chicago UP, 1999) with advice better integrated with other teaching-related issues, clearly written from a college instructor's perspective. For technical advice on how to build a stand-alone class website on your own, a general web design book such as R. Williams's excellent "Non-designer's Web Book," or even Horton's own "Web Style Guide," seem to be better choices.