Dreamweaver and the California job case

Martin Stabe recaps the ongoing debate about whether simple tools like Dreamweaver -- which no professional journalist is likely to ever use -- have a role in journalism education.

It reminds me a bit of Glenn Hanson requiring his typography students at the University of Illinois to learn the California job case sufficiently to set a paragraph of type. Or Daniel Slotnick making me write a tiny computer program in machine code (binary, not assembler). Waste of time? I don't think so. For a designer, an appreciation of how letterforms physically fit together is an asset you get from touching type, not from listening to a lecture or reading a book.

I don't use Dreamweaver. Never have, never will. But it seems to me to be a fine tool for exploring how information can fit together visually in a hypermedia presentation. In the real world, those students are going to be locked into heinously inflexible content management systems. There will be time for learning about them later. Classroom time should be devoted to illuminating the range of possibilities.

I'd also introduce journalism students to HTML and CSS, by the way -- not because they'll ever need to write HTML on a daily basis, but because they need to know something about the wires holding everything together under the hood. That's why Slotnick had a bunch of liberal-arts majors writing binary code by hand back in the dark ages of computing. I hated that exercise, and I love the fact that I did it.

Comments

Students in Jschools now are expected to know more about web design than ever before. From listening to some of the professionals who have talked to my multimedia classes, I've learned that members of my generation are expected to have a natural understanding of the way the web works. Many only understand the the web to the extent they can put together a Myspace page or use Facebook. And, when told they will need web skills to succeed in journalism, a common response is "I'm a writer. I want to focus on writing (or broadcasting)," or "All of that stuff is too complicated and/or scary for me to worry about." This is good news for people like me who go the extra mile to learn online skills.

At the very least, design skills are necessary for personal Web site construction. I'm going to be building my Web site in the next few weeks; I don't think I'd want someone else to be in control of the way my brand is presented to the rest of the world. And, HTML and CSS can be important when writing blogs, which have become online portfolios.

Hi, Steve.

You wrote: "it seems to me to be a fine tool for exploring how information can fit together visually in a hypermedia presentation."

I definitely agree with that statement. And I think a good ground in CMSs coupled with instruction in CSS can provide that more effectively and usefully than Dreamweaver.

You also wrote: "In the real world, those students are going to be locked into heinously inflexible content management systems. There will be time for learning about them later."

See, that's EXACTLY what I think journalism students should get a firm, hands-on experience with CMSs. They actually are extremely flexible tools, if you don't just take what you IT dept. hands you. There's lots of room to customize both the user interface and how the CMS delivers information to your site (and syndicates it out elsewhere) if you learn to recognize and exploit those opportunities.

That's something Dreamweaver can never teach anyone. Teaching a CMS should be fundamental to journalism education because it enables journalists to take a more direct role in shaping how their work gets presented and delivered to the community. Plus, once you see how a CMS can work with themes, CSS, and other display tools, you get all the design benefits of a dreamweaver experience and more.

IMHO, of course

- Amy Gahran