COM271, Week 1

Background—How did this course come to be?

Syllabus | Table of Pages | Assignments | References and Useful Links

Getting Courses on Web Development Approved at URI—Not so Fast!

What I hope you will learn in this course—following lectures, discussions, and exercises outlined in the syllabus—is a suite of skills adequate for you to construct useful and technically correct web pages for display on familiar browsers (e.g., Mac Safari, Mozilla FireFox, or Microsoft Internet Explorer).

How I came to the particular outline and choice of materials that presently make up the course stems from my own background and experience, including the experience of trying to develop, teach, and ultimately get formal approval for this course, COM271, and its sequel, COM372, as formal courses within the University's catalog. So let me tell you that story, briefly.

In 2001, I found myself tossed out of an administrative job after eight years, yet still an employee of the University. While attempting to restart a research career (my background was in entomology), I also contemplated getting courses started. I was already teaching aquatic entomology and had previously taught both a graduate writing class and a course on computer simulation for ecologists, but I saw an opportunity to fill what seemed to be a huge void at the University of Rhode Island, the absense of a formal curriculum in web technology. So, over winter break, I sat down with copies of the Lynda Weinmann hands-on-training materials for Dreamweaver and Photoshop, going through two 600-page manuals in a week each, and began to take on the task of being webmaster for my department. A few months later I began to work with small groups of students to teach them the rudiments, and I kept doing this for 2-3 more years. It seemed natural that I should begin teaching a course, so I submitted a proposal through the usual channels, and it was approved by the department and college, arriving eventually at the University's Curricular Affairs Committee. Here, my education began.

The course was not approved. A committee member from the College of Business opined that the University should not approve such a course because all high school graduates already knew how to make web pages using Microsoft Corporation's FrontPage program, and just as the University didn't teach algebra, we shouldn't teach web development. A member from Physics noted that I had mentioned I would use Dreamweaver, the leading web code expediting program (I had mentioned it twice), objecting that the University should not approve a course based on learning an application. A year later, the Committee again rejected a revised proposal, for the same reasons. Although I had carefully removed all mention of Dreamweaver or any particular application, I was told that the committee saw through my deception, knew for certain that I was still going to use Dreamweaver or some other application, so the objection held. (*Sigh*)

By 2004, I was being told by the administration of the college where I'd once been an administrator that I should give up pursuing proposals to teach web development on the grounds that the Department of Computer Science didn't want it taught and that it wasn't appropriate for a college whose chief purpose had become research in biotechnology. (Nor, I was told, would it be appropriate for a scientist to teach scientific writing). Dean Brownell offered me a joint appointment, teaching entomology (Aquatic and perhaps medical) in one college and web and writing in hers, but that was rejected because the new administration didn't "believe in joint appointments." So I left behind a thirty-year career in science and joined the College of Arts and Sciences, becoming a member of both the Department of Communication Studies and the College Writing Program. I was happy, but still needed to get courses approved.

I decided to attack the University's premise that it wasn't appropriate for a University to teach a subject like web development. Over a several month period, I developed a database by looking at the websites of 134 Universities, including the 125 Carnegie top research universities (an old system then in use that ranked based on dollars of research that Universities performed), plus a small group that URI regularly used when doing peer comparisons. The original database and the web page that turned it into an apprendix are currently unavailable (they were written in microsoft's ASP and Access databases, which my current server isn't supporting; I will be attempting to get one of my COM372 advanced students to convert this to PHP and MySQL and to resurrect it this semester). But the original analysis remains online ("Web Development Curricula in Research Universities: Analysis"), along with a proposal for a policy change ("Policy for a Web Development Curriculum at URI") for the CAC to update their 1988 policy on computer literacy, which was being used to bludgeon my web course proposals. A paper copy of the 125 page printout of the database is available in my office if you would like to read it. I think that the key part of the analysis was this:

Of the 80 institutions with web courses, I submit that seven are of particular use as real world models. These are Cornell, Harvard, NYU, Northeastern, UC San Diego, Washington U, and Cal Poly Pomona. The latter probably doesn't belong in the survey, as it is not one of the Carnegie's, Land Grants, etc. However, Cal Tech openly references it as a nearby resource where students can obtain web tech courses. Of the others, only Cornell seems to have a core web curriculum within a regular academic department (Computer Science), a set of courses that span the undergraduate program. Cornell also appears to be the most open institution in the survey in expressing a university-wide commitment to information technology "as a key enabling discipline vital to nearly all of its scholarly and scientific pursuits," and this community awareness appears to strongly influence the perspective of the Computing and Information Science Department. If there is an information technology revolution, Cornell appears to "get it."

The other six models all have varied and leading edge course offerings in the context of Professional / Extension Schools. None of these are remedial night school programs, to be sure. All reflect rigorous offerings in state of the art technology for demanding professional clientele. Washington University's Center for the Application of Information Technology (CAIT) is nearly 30 years old. It was built to respond to regional (St. Louis) needs for training in IT. Its course offerings are very diverse, including the full spectrum of current technologies, as well as offerings focused on the development environments (Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop). While seven of the University of California schools (the exceptions are UC San Francisco and UC Santa Barbara) all have extensive state-of-the-art web curricula, UC San Diego seems to have a particularly broad range of offerings, again in both technologies and applications. Harvard, Northeastern, and NYU have well established world-class professional schools, and their web curricula reflect that tradition with leading edge, demanding offerings.

That seemed to do the trick. Not wanting to dispute Harvard, NYU, Cornell or 77 other leading Universities, URI consented to approve COM271 and COM372, after 4 years of trying. I'd given up on even thinking about trying to offer such courses to graduate students, even though it was clear to me that there was a great need there. (I wasn't at all surprised, three years later (2007), when EDC 523 (now 525), Web Site Technology In Education & Training, which when approved featured a syllabus with 10 weeks of overt Dreamweaver training, was approved as a graduate course.)

What Would a Full Web Development Major Look Like? The Web Development Curricula exercise was based on a search for models (or parts of a model) of web curriculum. To develop a "prey image" for this, I had made the following outline for a series of courses which I coded WDT for Web Development Technology, as follows. The components that are highlighted in yellow are the topics that make up COM271.

For purposes of discussion, I suggest the following array of courses, with approximate course code level and principle topics as outlined, to comprise the major:

URI does not offer such a major, but we do provide an informal minor, which you can have approved through the Departments of Computer Science or Communication Studies. See Dr. Logan if you are interested. Normally, this would require that you complete both COM271 and COM372 (4 credits each), plus some graphic arts courses (for example: ART204 Digital Art and Design I; ART304 Digital Art and Design II; and ART306 Digital Art and Design III), a second (beyond COM372) database course (CSC436 Database Management Systems), or a course in network security (e.g., ELE438 (or CSC 418) Information and Network Security), and there are plenty of opportunities for independent studies via internships, etc.

You will have a pretty solid foundation if you complete work on static-site technology (i.e., this course), and the beginnings of a web career if you also become competent in database-driven websties (e.g., the server-side course outline above, or COM372 for open source (PHP and MySQL) dynamic web sites.