This morning starts the first class of a new course on multimedia storytelling design that I’m co-teaching with Professor Toni Locy of our journalism department. The subtitle of the course is “How’d They Do that?” The benefit of co-teaching with a journalist is that the copywriting is great! Here’s the course description:
Have you ever wondered how The New York Times and The Guardian put together their Pulitzer Prize-winning interactive stories, Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek and NSA Files Decoded: What the Revelations Mean to You? This course introduces students to digital tools that will help them imagine, design and create powerful, compelling interactive features with audio, video, graphics—and words—that are on the cutting edge of journalism and mass communications. Students will learn basic web design and programming skills through HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
This course is designed for students with little or no coding experience but who have a burning desire to learn, “How they did that,” so they no longer are mystified by what’s behind the curtain on websites. Students also will learn key terminology and practices that will enable them to envision, report and execute compelling online narratives through the interplay of text, images, sound and video that optimizes the reader experience. By the end of the term, students will appreciate the power and potential of interactive storytelling, and the creative possibilities of gathering and delivering the news in the 21st century.
The course meets Monday and Wednesday 10am – noon in the journalism lab, which is equipped with 15 iMacs. This is a very hands-on class, though we do not expect students to have had any prior experience with web design and development.
Wait!? No prior experience with web design? That does make it challenging since we need to teach the basics of HTML and CSS. Obviously, there’s no way that anyone can fully come up to speed on interactive web design in course of only one term. We aim to showcase the possibilities and to ensure that the students learn the foundations of web design. We want the students to come out of this course with the confidence and excitement that they can pursue careers in this area. Some may be enchanted by the design aspects, others may be intrigued by the possibilities of coding. And others may not pursue a technical career in web work, but at least will know how to converse intelligently with designers and developers.
The course is structured around deconstructing several examples of high-quality multimedia journalism. Among the sites we’ll be examining:
- Snow Fall: Avalanche at Tunnel Creek
- NSA Files Decoded: What the Revelations Mean to You
- Firestorm
- A Game of Shark and Minnow
Each class period will start with the students discussing their reactions to various elements of a particular site. We want the students to think about the elements (interactivity, color, typography, etc.) used by each site to engage readers. Then we’ll pull back the curtain, so to speak, to dissect the actual construction of the site. Along the way, we will teach HTML and CSS from the ground up.
The students also will work on a course project as a team. The project will incorporate everything that they’ve learned. Since this is a journalism class, the project will have a significant reporting component. Students will brainstorm and storyboard the project, then implement it as a web site. The result will be an interactive multimedia story.
This is going to be an exicting and intense course!
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