Student Web Projects
English 441A, Miami University, Fall 1996
[Please note that these students have graduated, so most of their Web pages
have disappeared -- Miami Web accounts are closed upon graduation. I have saved
a few of these projects on a permanent Web site.]
- Web Assignment Number 2, DONE!
- See excerpts from each student's completed Web assignment: students
went to the New
Child Exhibit on the Web, looked at pictures, selected one and asked themselves,
"What conception of childhood informs this painting?"
- Kendra Lacy, Women of the Romantic Period
- "Never have I put as much work into a class as I have in this class."
- "After reading Barbauld, I became convinced that for some reason good
female writers had been, for many years, excluded from the canon. . . . I
wanted to explore the politics behind women being remembered in the canon."
- "For every author or literary work I referenced in my web pages, I
wanted a link to another page, written by someone else. This required doing
many searches on Magellen, Infoseek, Lycos, Excite, and Yahoo."
- "The actual process of making a web page was very different than
writing a papers. It was more like writing a storyboard ro a cartoon or TV
show."
- Alison Browne, Jenny Hartman, and Erica Lell, The
Concept of the Child in Art and Literature
- Jenny: "I have a new html vocabulary that I did not have
before this project. . . . I also understand the concept of a web page now, how
it functions and how it can be manipulated."
- Erica: "This whole thing was like a math problem: whatever
commands you being, you have to end, and commanded words have to be framed
symmetrically."
- Alison: "This project required much more work than I
had anticipated! I probably could have done three 10-page research papers in
the amount of time I spent on my web page. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little, but
it did take a lot of time between group meetings, trips to the library,
research, and computer lab time. The computer lab time took about 10 hours in
itself."
- Jenny: "I must say with complete honesty, I have never put so
much time, effor and work in on any single project for any other class as I did
for this web page. To my best estimate, . . . I have spent 52 hours working on
this assignment."
- Erica: "I don't think there was anything especially hard about
doing this--though I had fears at the beginning. Thanks goes to Kendra for
telling me to relax, giving me some direction at the beginning of the process,
and ecouraging me all the way through!"
- Alison: "I had a difficult time getting started, but as soon
as Eirca and you got me going, I began to understand what I needed and how to do
it."
- Jenny: "I found writing an informational page for the web to
be very difficult. It's riskier. More people than the professor are going to
see it."
- Erica: "[T]he computer lab was my home-away-from-dorm during
the last two weeks!"
- Jenny: "My favorite search engine is Yahoo. . . . I searched
the net so many times I started going in circles. Many of the links end up in
the same places."
- Erica: "I did spend a lot of time trying to find pictures,
doing net searches, etc. Honestly, though, I didn't mind, and I wanted to do
the extra work. Ultimately my goal is to get this page as good as it can be so
I can use it as a postive addition to a resume."
- Jenny: "I really never believed at the beginning of this class
that I would ever have completed a web page as far along as mine is now. . . .
[My web page] is better than I ever thought possible, even if it is unfinished.
I feel a real sense of accomplishment with this project."
- Scott Cunningham, William Blake: Sex-Crazy Madman!!??
- "I was most happy when I was actually taught how to make my sample web
page. Seeing it up on the screen and knowing I could make something accessible
to the world is kind of mind-boggling."
- "I spent what I feel to be A LOT of time in the computer labs. . . .
But every time I left, I was happy with the little and slow progress I had made.
And that's pretty key: what 'I had made.'. . . . I did it ALL (except
for the picture scanning) by myself. . . . Maybe I should have taken more help
from others--but I didn't--and this is my web page.
- Mary Clare Cahill, Jane Austen: *Sense and Sensibility*
(student graduated; page no longer available--June, 1997)
- "I loved it--and I am not just brown-nosing! To tell you the truth,
my other exam grades will suffer because I went crazy on the Web."
- "My biggest triumph was when I began to type '{a href="/~...}'
like it was nothing!!!"
- "I hope that this is not the last time I have a chance to create a
page."
- Mark Aronowitz, The
British Abolition Movement
- "My good friend Kevin is great with computers and he set up a great
deal of technology for this site. I tried to learn from him as we went along."
- "There was a large amount of technical nightmares and wasted hours."
- "Although I spent a lot of time on this project, I feel that it was
worth it. The idea is very cool. I just wish that computers weren't so
annoying."
- Brad Zawodny, William Blake
- "I was pretty well familar with the web-making process before this
class. A friend of mine keeps his own web page and I siphoned a lot from him.
He has a book called HTML for Dummies . . . ."
- "Getting an idea of what I wanted the page to look like took a long
time. It isn't easy to type in a bunch of commands and know the page will look
like. There is a lot of forward and backtracking."
- Stephen Koenig, Charles Lippert, Selected Poems and Analyses
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (page no longer available; students dismantled
the page, June 1997)
- Stephen: "I had to learn everything to make this web page. I
kept track of my hours and it came to 43. I missed all of the instructional
periods when the class learned about HTML and VMS and FTP and all that stuff, so
I pretty much figured it out by seeing how other people had created their pages
from document sources [using the "View" drop-down menu in Netscape,
and clicking on "document source" to see the codes].
- Charles: "Learning the web technology was difficult. I had
never used my VAX account before . . . . Steve showed me how to do the basics
and fool around with obtaining document sources. Probably the greates resource
I had in finding out how to make the web page was the document sourcing and
Steve my partner."
- Stephen: "I had an excellent time making this page. It was a
lot of work, but very rewarding."
- Jennifer McLain, Jane
Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft: On the Proper Conduct and Education of Young
Ladies
- "Balancing the internet research and book research was . . .
difficult, because I have done book research before, but internet stuff was new
and interesting."
- "The project itself, especially the final touches and editing were
most difficult for me. I think that this is because I could not figure out when
I was finished."
- Jeannie Goodwin, Jon Wagner, William Blake: His Poetry and
Engravings in *The Songs of Innocence and of Experience*
- Jeannie: "I came to this project with no HTML experience
whatsoever. I had to learn the basics and teach Jon what I knew."
- Jon: "I went from someone who had no idea what HTML was to
someone who can't be around a computer without trying something new."
- Jeannie: "I have to admit that it was frustrating at times
when something as simple as a missing tag took fifteen minutes to remedy. . . .
Most of what we learned was through trial and error."
- Jon: "I'd say--conservatively--we spent over 20 hours working
on this page, but the time wasn't spent staring stupidly at the screen, it was
spent with trial and error."
- Jeannie: "Surprisingly, what took the longest for me to figure
out was how to divide up my thoughts about Blake's art and poetry. . . . [I]t
was just tremendously difficult to figure out what to put up where. Which
concept made the most sense for each poem? Where should I put the
psycho-sociological research? Where do I get to talk about the works as a
whole? Those were the things that I really worked hard to figure out with my
true brain; the technology was just hands-on."
- Jon: "Overall, I'm extremely proud of this page. I learned a
lot about Blake and just as much about the Web. It makes me proud to think
that--just maybe--someone not related to this class will look at our page.!"
- Tim Gugerty, Wordsworth and Coleridge
- "I think I will be continually making updates to the page after I turn
it in--I don't think it's avoidable at this point."
- Joshua Neumeier, Innocence vs. Experience: an Adventure in William
Blake
- "I spent a lot of time searching for a decent Blake page,
because there are a lot and not all of them are very good. I learned a lot
about searching on the web and finding things fast."
- "My hard-drive on my home computer failed, taking with it all of my
work. . . . I had to start the whole project over the day before it was due . .
. . "
- Jodi Thompson, Mary Wollstonecraft
- "For papers, I always concentrated on what the actual words were
saying about one particular aspect taht I was trying to prove or disprove. With
this [web page], I not only know what the words of *Vindications of the Rights
of Women* are saying, but I know what expreiences led Mary Wollstonecraft to
write them, and I know something of what those words meant at that time."
- "I started this class knowing nothing about computers, and I MADE A
WEB PAGE! I'll be for a few days, but
it will be worth it."