By Karen Price
Students at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication are logging plenty of hours at construction sites these days.
And you won't need a hard hat to visit them.
You do need a hard drive.
That's because the building zones exist in campus computers, and the labor force consists of forward-thinking students intent on keeping up with the cutting edge of media development.
Teaching students to master the changing world of media and technology is the goal of Associate Professor Roslyn Dauber's New Media Use and Design class.
Each semester, students in her class work together to design a Web site of their choice, and each semester the site is more sophisticated. This fall the job was to build an instructional World Wide Web site accessible through the School's home page: The Electronic Art Studio.
"The site is about the aesthetics and mechanics of designing for the Web," said Dauber, who owned her own company working with CD-ROM developers before coming to CU, and continues to consult for multimedia startup companies.
The finished project is designed to teach users how to work with different types of media online. Each section of the site simulates entering an art studio, where users will learn how to use graphics, photographs, video, audio, writing and animation. To design the site, students researched the various tools for putting sites together to decide what they want to use in their own designs.
The objective of the course is to "familiarize students with the vast world of new media . . . talking about new communications technologies in news, publishing, entertainment, personal communications, education, health and business," Dauber said.
The emphasis is on teamwork, with each student responsible for a different area of expertise in putting together the Electronic Art Studio. One person works on the programming, another writes the copy, another decides what to use for audio and video, and so on.
Dauber said the projects illustrate the importance of bringing together everyone's backgrounds and interests, something vital for the success of projects in the new-media workplace.
"Creating and maintaining sites is very interdisciplinary," she said.
"You have to have a programmer, you have to have a writer, you have to have a graphic artist. It's too complex for one person to master.
"It's not just being a good journalist. It's understanding how you have to prepare the material for the next phase of production."
Because the class meets only once a week, students must work effectively outside of class to complete the project.
Dauber expects them to check e-mail daily, spend lots of time on the Web and routinely review other sites and CD-ROMS.
Students finish the class with marketable skills and a solid sense of accomplishment, but Dauber emphasizes how quickly Web development tools become obsolete.
She encourages students to continue to vigorously explore the World Wide Web by taking additional courses off campus to master Web skills such as Photoshop, subscribing to new-media magazines and joining new-media organizations.
"The greatest opportunities for journalists today are online,'' Dauber said.
"The more you know about the World Wide Web, the better prepared you are for the job market."
