Are you ready to hit power level 9000!? Then read through this lesson plan to be a Super Saiyan .
Here's the proposed topics I've come up with to start. We may deviate from here as far as timing or how long we spend on different ones.
Week 1 - Establishing an online identity
Treating ourselves as brands, we will establish accounts and begin to setup the foundation for submission of assignments throughout the semester
Reviewing some brands from previous classes
Week 2 – Web fundamentals HTML / CSS
We’ll peak into the history of the web, where it’s come from and play with the foundational technologies HTML (page structure) and CSS (Page design / layout).
We’ll use codepen to fork pens, practice HTML and CSS and create a basic resume from a template
Week 3 – JavaScript and modern front end web development
If HTML structures content and CSS presents it visually, JavaScript brings interactivity to the web. We’ll cover some different programming techniques and libraries used in front end web development
We’ll use codepen, stackblitz, glitch.me and other yarn/npm to play with JavaScript at a level that you
Week 4 – Brand improvement / Web Research / investigation
This week there is no Tuesday class because of required university wellness day
Thursday we’ll briefly talk about SEO and do a partner activity where we give feedback to a peer based on their current progression in their YouTube brand
Review other student’s brands and give them 3 recommendations on how to improve their brand as well as 3 ways to improve your own
Week 5 – Git / Github / Contribution
Collaborative participation on Github, understanding concepts of Git / version control and how teams leverage this technology for code and non-code projects
How developers work together, what that looks like in practice
Markdown, an abstracted way of simplifying the creation of content
We’ll do a live activity where we see how commits get merged, how teams work together and manage merge conflicts
Week 6 – GravCMS – A simple, flat file PHP CMS
While not the most popular it’s a very approachable an easy to understand CMS that uses a flat file system approach to structure and deliver content
This is the first week we’ll use Reclaim hosting / Reclaim cloud / own server
For lab we’ll build a simple marketing website for a (fake) government agency
Week 7 – WordPress / ClassicPress – The most popular CMS
I’m told students get WordPress because of ease of use... until I actually talked to people and realized this isn’t the case. We’ll cover the basics of WordPress and build a simple site from nothing that does rather powerful things
For lab we’ll use Wordpress to build a simple e-commerce website for a small business (maybe even a real one if you want)
Week 8 – Drupal Intro – The most expensive, powerful, profitable CMS
Drupal is a marketable skill just knowing basic site building so let’s build out that resume and give you insight into one of the oldest web communities
There is no class Thursday of this week due to a university mandated wellness day.
We will start on a longer lab this week but in keeping with wellness plans it will not be due to the following week
Week 9 – Drupal Again – More advanced areas of Drupal
Because Drupal is really complicated and our schedule got a little goofed up we’ll cover Drupal’s system UI in greater detail
Lab 8 & 9 will be submitted together as Lab 9 builds on what we started in Lab 8
Spring Break – JUST KIDDING
Week 10 – Web components and the vision of HAXTheWeb
HTML on steroids and the future of all application development, web or otherwise, web components is a standard that leverages HTML, CSS and JavaScript in a novel way that will forever change the web
As founder of the #HAXTheWeb project I’ll share my visioon for the future of all web publishing systems and how we can shift away from the monopolies that own communication mediums and warp them to their desires.
We’ll build an example webcomponent via codepen, stackblitz and play with the HAX authoring environment
Week 11 – HAXcms – A Penn State innovation to change publishing and OER
HAXcms is an innovation to come out of ELMS:LN / HAXTheWeb for building sustainable yet advanced web properties
We’ll discuss what HAXcms is, how it works, why it works, ways it can be extended and modified and play with it on hax.psu.edu as well as the notion of sustainability and permanence on the web
For lab, we’ll gather UX feedback using a technique called “User Recitation” with a partner and use that feedback to step through and make issue posts in the project issue queue to improve the platform in the future
Week 12 - Server Virtualization technologies
Docker and containerization technologies have changed systems development forever, we’ll explore these, surrounding applications and learn why they are so powerful
For lab we’ll use a free service called Play with Docker to deploy some example containers
We’ll have a guest speaker from a major technology company present on this topic.
Week 13 – Exam
Open internet exam covering all the topics we covered in class.
You will have the week to complete this exam and we will use class time to start to discuss the needs behind the final project
Week 13 – 15 Final project
We’ll discuss parts of a film called Hypernormalization as well as other dystopia takes on the anti-reality which we find ourselves in and write about it. This will lead us into the final project about how we can leverage technology and envision a more decentralized future for the web and society.
This project will be announced at the start of week 13 and you’ll have 3 weeks to work on it with a partner. It will be due Tuesday of finals week.
Past projects have involved Open Educational resources, educational web technologies and learning analytics / tracking capabilities
Week 16 – Finals week, project due Tuesday of this week