This course has three primary goals: one is to help you develop the basic technical skills necessary for creating a robus website and maintaining it; another is to help you develop the rhetorical (including visual rhetoric) skills necessary for writing and designing effective online/digital materials; the third is to help you understand the current theories of new media and the historical and cultural contexts that shape and are shaped by those media. These goals are admittedly broad, perhaps to an impossibly vast extent, but that's ok; my interest lies mostly in exposing you to the current thinking about and practices of new media development, helping you to develop the critical thinking and the technical skills necessary to be comfortable continuing on your own once the class is over.

Readings this semester will range from instructive/practical to theoretical and speculative as we explore the implications of new media for traditional models of analog media. There is no assigned or required textbook. I'll distribute articles and chapters as necessary, and I'll encourage you to pursue further readings on your own. I will expect, though, for you to spend a lot of time online and be prepared to discuss your online activities in class.

We're covering a lot this semester, and the variety of topics I anticipate, along with my uncertainty about how much you do and don't already know, along with a whole lot of other complications, leave me with the following rough over of concepts, theories, and topics to cover:

• The history and context of new media, working to define it in relation to old media: what it is, how it's produced, distributed, delivered, and consumed, who cares about its new-ness, and such.
• Rhetoric (with concentrated attention on audience and genre), visual rhetoric, and basic document and graphic design principles as they relate to web and multimedia content.
• Information architecture, or how to structure content. This will include attention to hypertext theory as well as modular and dynamic content.
• Technology that enables the internet; the software tools for writing and building web content.
• Web content. We'll look at what's out there, discuss who's producing it (and why), who's using it (and why), what impact it's having on old ways of doing, and what's still to be done.

You will be working all semester to produce a single, robust, dynamic website that serves a need or fills a niche or suits a personal talent that you've identified. This site will include the following:

• Information content (about the site's purpose and including discussions, with links, to related sites).
• A blog that concentrates on your site's topic.
• A podcast (and possibly a videocast).
• Whatever core content your site includes.
• A link to a Wikipedia article that you write and that's related to your site's content or purpose (not an ad for your site).
• A link to a personal site you'll build that will include an audience/genre analysis of your site and competitor sites, a c.v., and repurposed work to build a portfolio.

My agenda here is admittedly ambitious, but I think your honest efforts will be deeply rewarded.