Welcome to digital media in the humanities (aka. Multimedia!). This course was taught to me by Dr. Sinclair, and was a very informational class.

Overview
The big project in this class is creating a web site. You don't need to know how to make websites prior to the class as...

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How hard was this class in 2010/2011? and will it remain the same or similar for the upcoming year?

Yes I am interested as well to know if anybody took it this past year and can comment on it

Anyone?
help a first year out

Hi everyone. I took this course during the Fall term of 2010. It was very do-able. The breakdown was:

5 Quizzes (on A2L) @ 15%
3 Worksheets @ 10%
2 Assignments @ 30%
1) Website Proposal (Outline of Website) @ 10%
2) Finished Website @ 20%
Tutorial Participation @ 10% ( made merely of attendance)
Final Exam @ 35% ( Included of short answer, some 1 word answers)

Overall this course is very interesting and you can learn quite a bit from it. It is highly recommended that you go to class, but I was still able to do well even though I stopped going half way through the term. You will do the assignments and worksheets with people in your tutorial ( 3 people/ worksheet and 2/ assignment). For us, our website had to be on a type of multimedia. My partner and I chose to do our assignment on a facebook app. The website is in the form of a digital essay, thus you need to write a good essay that flows, but most marks are given for design, structure and appearance. If you have any other questions, feel free to message me.

I took this course in Fall 2010 as well, with Professor Stefan Sinclair.

Overall, I found the course content to be very interesting. There is a strong emphasis on the modern and historical definition of "multimedia". Towards the beginning of the course we learned about the history of computing, and then went into things like design. Prof. Sinclair is a very enthusiastic guy and I've never found myself bored during his lecture. He seemed very approachable and overall was very laid-back.

There were small weekly quizzes which would be completed online on avenue and overall, were bsed on lecture content only and very easy to get perfect marks on. We also had to work with some other people from our tutorial section on "worksheets" , which essentially is a topic assigned to you and you're supposed to write your opinion on it. Again, easy marks.

Tutorials proceeded smoothly (depending on your TA), but I found that they were pretty rushed, especially when it came to learning CSS in dreamweaver. The TA I had tried her best to help everyone with their questions but I think that a lot of people were clueless anyway.

There was no midterm but the main project in the course was a website that you design and code in dreamweaver. I disliked the fact that this was a partners project, as it's next to impossible to code a site with someone else, but given the large amount of students I guess this was to make marking easier.

The exam was very easy and Prof. Sinclair gave out a lot of tips about what would be on it, which was very helpful. (Can you tell how much I liked him? LOL)

p.s. there's also no textbook! Make sure to go to class, because some obscure facts show up on the quizzes.

I wouldn't call this a bird course. I really enjoyed it with Dr. Sinclair, and I did finish with a 12 but he's not naive to the fact that people take it thinking it's going to be extremely easy. By the end of the term when I took it in September 2009, more than half of the class has stopped coming. The problem with not going to lecture is that his slides are extremely vague and so you can't necessarily rely on them to catch yourself up on things that you've missed. This course is very specific and uses a lot of multimedia "lingo" with regards to technological innovations and systems so if you're not there to write down what he says, it can actually be quite difficult to find that information later, even with full access to the internet.

I know that many people failed the exam or complained that it was extremely difficult. And I'd agree if you didn't bother coming to class and getting all the information you needed to study. The way he structured it, it had something like 30 statements where you had to write the answer; like a definitions type of section (not multiple choice). The next section listed 8 topics with no explanations (some were simply acronyms) and you had to choose 7 and write over a page about them in an exam booklet, defining/explaining them and their significance. Essentially regurgitating everything you had learned about them. So you can see how that would be hard if you skipped class and had no idea what half of these words meant. You'd literally be expected to explain all you knew about "ABC" for instance (just an example).

So yeah, if you're willing to go to class and write down everything properly and then take the time to memorize/understand its significance, you can easily do well in this class. If not, then I wouldn't bother because you will not do well.

Also for the website project, be sure you work with someone reliable. I ended up with a partner who left me to write the entire 12 page essay, and who did a horrible job of their only assigned task of picking the design elements for the website and coding them. So yeah, pick someone who's willing to contribute because it's a big headache otherwise.

Cheers!