English 290: Introduction to Computer-Mediated Communication -- Malaspina University-College

Welcome to English 290: Introduction to Computer Mediated Communication, from Malaspina University-College on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. To register, link to Malaspina's Admissions site. For more information about the instructor, visit Marshall Soules' Home Page.

Here's how to move around in our virtual classroom: by clicking on the icons in the left-hand margin, or on the menu at the top of the page, you will be linked to other pages with information about the course.

Description

A full description of the course, as well as some background on computer-mediated communication.

Week-to-Week

Schedule of weekly activities, resources, and assignments. From here, you can link to individual pages for each week. During the course, you need to refer to the Week-to-Week page regularly to keep up with course news and references, assignments, and readings available online.

Newsgroup

Connects you to a page with directions for accessing the course discussion group on EZBoard.

Assignments

Describes the graded assignments and due dates. This course is designed to be completed over a three month period from January 8th to April 2nd, 2003.

Resources

A jumping off point for references and sources useful for computer-mediated communication.

Search

You will be able to search this site as well as connect to other internet search options.

Students

Email addresses for course participants, and eventually the URLs for webpage projects.

Instructor

My home page with links to Media Studies courses and the English Department.

Journal

An opportunity for course participants to publish their best work on the World Wide Web.

Hardware and Software

All of the assignments can be completed from your location of choice and submitted electronically. To accomplish this, you will need to have access to a computer with internet access--either through Malaspina University-College, or another internet service provider (ISP). A reliable internet connection is important for this course because we will use the world wide web extensively.

You will also need an email account, a browser such as Netscape (4.0 or better) or Internet Explorer (5.0 or better), a file transfer program (WS_FTP), and a text editor. Both internet browsers suggested above have suitable email and news reader applications built into them (if they have been installed).

I encourage people to use a text editor while learning html and recommend against the use of composer software until after the basic html skills have been learned.

The Malaspina computer labs, and my own computers, are PCs running either Windows 98 or 2000. Since the computer labs encourage the use of Microsoft Internet Explorer, instructions are provided for IE in the course descriptions. If you have any questions about the suitability of the equipment and software applications available to you, please ask your techno-savvy friends for advice or send me an email.

Information Technology Services

Malaspina's IT Centre has a helpful website at http://web.mala.bc.ca/it/index.htm where you can find online computing support, resources, and software for download. Malaspina also has a student multimedia lab on the ground floor of the Library where you can develop your multimedia projects, often with some technical assistance available.