When I began this course, I considered myself fairly tech-savvy. I had the good fortune to be a bored 13 year-old with lots of free time and a pretty geeky sensibility when the internet first became "The Internet." Thus, I've spent a lot of time working with computers and the web, from adding memory cards to my 486 to waiting 10 minutes for web pages to download. From that point, I've used the internet continuously, from the rise and fall of Napster during my early college years, to the use of online libraries, learning to conduct (and later teach) how to perform online legal research, and wasting far too much time on various social networking sites.
But what remained a bit of a mystery to me was how to actually create web pages and place them on the web, which is what I've gained from this course. I now understand how to connect to a server, post content, and edit pages using a variety of tools. My primary responsibility for the group project was to take charge of creating the group's site, which truly tested my skills. With the knowledge gained from the course, and lots of trial and error, I successfully created a site in Dreamweaver, using xhtml and css.
Creating the page for the group project was by far the most challenging and rewarding assignment in the course. By taking the information learned in class, and the lessons from the readings (most notably Krug's "Don't Make Me Think") I was able to create a website that not only functioned, but looked pretty cool as well. I found that I could not just identify the problems in my page, but even better, fix them, and update my pages on the server. This has given me a great sense of accomplishment, and a realization that I actually can design and produce a functioning site.
There is little I would change about the course. I found that I got a lot more out of the lectures and assignments than the assigned readings. Overall, I found "Fluency with Information" to be alternately too high-level and too low-level, and pretty much abandoned those readings aside from light skimming before class. This is in contrast to my experience with the Krug book, which I found extremely useful, and a text I will almost certainly refer to in the future. So, the one major change I would make would be to eliminate the text altogether, except for background reading as desired. Other than that, I wouldn't change much, the lectures were engaging, the assignments were appropriate and met their stated goals, and the group project has been a good experience thus far. I'm very glad I took this course, it has provided me with far more useful (and marketable) skills for my career than most other SIRLS courses I have taken.
