Der kører en interessant debat om, hvorvidt man skal bruge Dreamweaver i undervisningen af journalister (Mindy McAdams har også blogget om det).
Interessant i denne debat er dog dette blogindlæg af Mark Comerford, hvor han hellere vil tale underligg…

– a text editor
– Photoshop

What we lack in client-side software, we make up for in a dizzying array of browser-based tools. We use two blogging platforms, a legacy CMS, a homegrown content platform for new products, a video tool, a user-generated content platform, a publishing system for electronic newsletters, a couple of wikis for internal documents and probably a few other tools I can’t think of at the moment.

Accordingly, when I began teaching a section of the introductory online journalism course at USC this semester, I set out to use only web-based tools in the class. I’ve taught wikitext, WordPress (yes, we use the code view, not the WYSIWYG editor) and Flickr/Picnik. Before the end of the semester, we’ll spend some time with Google Maps and, hopefully, VuVox (a very cool Flash-based collage/slide-show app). We did maybe an hour’s fly-through of Photoshop, since it’s so ubiquitous, but for purposes of an intro class you could almost skip Photoshop and do all your image editing in Picnik.

Personally, I like using Dreamweaver after my CSS is finished. I switch into code view a lot, but it’s often convenient to use design view. I also like the convenience of FTPing from within DW.

Yes, do teach them HTML/CSS but teach them proper markup and structure and not much else. They don’t need to worry about how the end result will look (journalist usually aren’t that good at design, leave it to those that are) but they do need to semanticaly and logicaly structure a document the way it should be.

Tell them a list is a list, a table is a table and headings are not just large bold text. It doesn’t matter if they end up writing in a word processor or HTML. The structure should basically be the same. Properly structured HTML generated by MS Word is a lot easier to clean up than completely reworking a poorly structured one.

i’m giving a crash course in html to the reporters and editors at my paper this week, and it’s not going to involve dreamweaver at all.

There’s a lot to cover out there, obviously, but I don’t want them tied to the software (DW) so much that they can’t look at a web site and figure out what’s going on under the hood.

As for what was mentioned earlier by someone about the reporters writing the story and then getting it over to the websters who put it into the CMS, i suspect that’s going to change before long. Reporters will be putting their content directly into the CMS, and the process will be more integrated. Also, reporters who are blogging are already often posting their content into a CMS.

She teaches theory and techniques as well as dipping into CSS only briefly.

Students learn why theory — of color, of emotion, of eye-tracking, of marketing techniques like building personas — is important.

And they learn how one can spend a lifetime, or at least several years, learning to do CSS or Flash right.

Then the students can choose where to dig and learn more deeply.

Her balance between theory and practice, and her willingness to learn new stuff with the students, was amazing.

Google her, or let me know if you want a sample syllabus.