Friday, January 19, 2007

Getting back to the old routine!!!

This week has been pretty eventful as we were given our results for our previous assignments and were also given two brand new assignments. After having so much time off and feeling quite relaxed I soon realised that I had to quickly revert back to being focused on the course.

On Wednesday morning we were given our results for the two assignments that we were working on previously. I was quite apprehensive about this because even though I knew I had put a lot of time and effort into each assignment I was aware of how simple things missed can easily lead to a referral. I was however delighted to learn that I had achieved a merit for assignment A3 and a pass for assignment A4. This was a good experience as it gave me renewed confidence for the upcoming assignments as I would not have to revisit anything. I will do my utmost to mirror this in my new assignments because being able to focus totally on them and not having to worry about old assignments is a huge relief.

Wednesday also involved the distribution of the new assignment “A5 Builder”. This involves building the back to basics website that we planned previously. It is going to be made in Dreamweaver and this is a program that I am looking forward to working with as it is the primary piece of software that I am going to be using over the duration of the course. I am however a little anxious about using this as Steve explained just how complex this application is.

Thursday also involved the introduction of a new assignment with “A6 Revert to Type”. This is a typography assignment culminating in a 5 minute presentation and timed piece of work. This is something which I was not really expecting but I think that it will be a good experience as we will be forced to work under more pressurised circumstances. This is eventually the type of situation that we can expect when we gain employment after the course so it should be a beneficial task. Tasks are also given out randomly and not at the beginning which means that time planning for this assignment is much more difficult.

In my self study this week I decided to spend time looking through some of the further reading exercises for assignment “A5 Builder” as this will be my first ever website. I found the World Wide Web Consortium website to be quite interesting as it is something that I have not really looked at in depth before. By looking at this I learnt much more about the use of CSS and where it originated from which helped me to understand the coding a bit better. The original proposal can be found at
http://www.w3.org/People/howcome/p/cascade.html.

4 comments:

Craig Burgess said...

w3c can be very useful for some of the stuff out there, but don't take all their words as law.

They speak alot of sense but some the standardisation is a little bit too extreme.

Richard said...

I agree time planning is going to be much more difficult for the A6 assignment.

It may improve our mark if we redo the time plans almost weekly as we are given new tasks.

Scott Dunwoodie said...

I am also looking forward to using "Dreamweaver" it does seem quite complex. It's good to know we have a few experienced users within the class to help us out!

J.Milsom said...

I like the idea of knowing how to use Dreamweaver aswell, I've never used it before so I'm hoping i can pick it up fairly quickly. Thank's for the link you found too, Im sure that I'll find it useful. I'd like to know how to create the page properties options using the CSS like Steve said (such as background colours and fonts etc.). Im sure that will be tough though