Spring 2002
CNH 0516 - unless we find better space
Purpose of the Course: This course is designed to equip digital media students with the basic tools and processes of production and project management. To a surprising extent, these tools are independent of whether the student is an artist, programmer, theme park designer, movie producer or architect of virtual worlds and video games. The course will build students' understanding of creative leadership, techniques for managment, and personal strengths required to succeed in a career in media. Many of the skills required to bring media projects from concept to completion are not purely technical ("which button do I push now?") - they concern the intangible but essential tasks of planning, time management, and motivation of self and others. This course has been called "Digital Media Boot Camp". It was not designed to be easy. Some of you will fail.
Content of the Course: Three kinds of material are covered in the course:
- Techniques for leadership and creativity
- Techniques for management, including tools such as Microsoft Project
- Experiences to foster personal insight into your individual strengths
and weaknesses, to help you become more productive
We try to preach as little as possible and make you work as much as possible. You will be writing, giving presentations, building Web pages, arguing for your point of view, and constantly trying to convince the instructor that you are a mature, reliable, creative and immensely talented.
Who Should Take The Course, and When? All Digital Media students are required to take this course before undertaking a Senior Project. In order to succeed in this course, you need to be a capable web page builder - because the course's working documents and projects are all expressed as web pages. This skill involves both a knowledge of HTML, and an understanding of the environment in which web pages are hosted. There will be a short diagnostic quiz on the first day, to help you determine if you have the necessary skills.
In fact let's do it NOW, so that you can get out of here before we start making groups.
Aha. Are you still with me? Let's go on.
If you are following the 2000/2001 or 2001/2002 catalogs, Seminar in Digital Arts is your only requirement. For 2002/3 and later catalogs, Production I and Production II are both required. (It's your choice at this point.)
Groups: While some activities are performed in groups, the major project of this course is an individual effort. Your interaction with groups will be primarily for the purpose of improving your personal product, and thus your grade. In subsequent courses (DM Production II, Project I and II) the emphasis will shift to group projects, once you've proven yourself as a capable individual performer.
Format: The course will consist of two 110 minute meetings per week. This time will be used in various ways - seldom as straight lectures. Many times you will be meeting in smaller groups in the CREAT lab (VAB 221) or the classroom. There will be a midterm exam and final exam, as well as weekly assignments and projects. Attendance is required and graded. Only two non-medical excused absences per semester are permitted; written documentation is required.
Grades:
Attendance and participation 150
points. These points are "yours to lose". You lose 2 points per class missed,
1 point per late arrival in class, 2 points per assignment not posted on
the web page by the time specified. No excuses except written medical ones.
Presentation 100 points (group grading)
Project Book 1 - 150 points (group project, individual grading)
Project Book 2 - 200 points (individual project)
Midterm Exam 200 points
Final Exam 200 points
Total 1000 points = 100%. 900 to 1000 is A, etc. No plus-minus grading is used.
Texts: (1) Microsoft Project 2000, Step By Step. Chatfield,
Carl S. Microsoft Press, 2000.
(2) Project Management.
Hobbs,
Peter. Amacom Press (American Management Association) 2000
Academic Honesty: You are to do your own work. Any inclusion of others' work as a brief citation must be properly referenced. Detection of any unauthorized and unreferenced copying will result in a failing grade for that assignment.
Study Buddies: Before leaving the first class, you are to obtain the phone numbers and e-mail of two or more fellow students. (These don't have to be group members, as we'll be selecting groups after class.) If you need reminding of what the assignment is, or need to talk to somebody about how to do it, call one of them.
Have a look at the schedule for the course. If you would like a spreadsheet version (perhaps it's easier to print out) here it is in Excel format. This is the most colorful schedule I've ever built.
The left column (Tuesday) represents lectures, usually given by me. The center column (Thursday) represents activities that take place in class. The right hand column ("Friday before 5:00 PM") represents deliverables that you must provide by the specified time, to get credit for that portion of the course.
There are five DOCUMENTS that are the key to this course. These are numbered D1 through D5. You will learn how to write (and put on the Web) all of these documents. We begin with D1: Request for Proposal, usually called RFP.
The Web Site. Everybody in this course is going to put their work on a common web site that we will maintain on the CREAT server. We will use a standard structure so that we can all find our way around your sites. I will announce this structure as we go along (via THIS web site!) Hereafter when I refer to yourURL, I mean a URL whose prefix is provided to you by Peter SuperTech and (if your name is Jane Q Smith) ends in /smithjq.
Groups will have similar URLs but they will end in /group1 or /group2 (I'll assign you the numbers). Hereafter in this document, if I refer to group1, replace it with your group's number.
The Teams. I will gather information about your schedules in the first class meeting. Approximately nine (n/4 where n is the total number of people in class when I get to this point) of your classmates will volunteer to work with these schedules after class today, to assemble teams that have a common meeting time available.
Your team site's header page at group1/index.html will contain a list of e-mail addresses of each person, with the coordinator first (and marked as the coordinator.)
Client and Contractor. Each team will be assigned a NAME (GlomStar Galactic Enterprises? You get to choose) and will have two missions: as Client to some other group, and as Contractor to some other group. In your role as Client, you will be "operating" a business and engaging the other firm to design a web site for you. In your role as Contractor, you will be designing a website for another business.
You're not actually going to BUILD a web site for the other group. Instead, you're going to build (four of) the Five Documents, so as to learn the steps of the production process. This exercise takes up the first half of the semester, and teaches you how these documents work. You will build these documents as web pages - but it is their content, not primarily their format, that is being graded.
In the second half of the semester, you will use what you have learned to build the Five Documents again. This time you will be working alone, for a client (another student), to build their personal web site. You may (and probably will) use your group as a sounding board and consultant pool, but your work will be individually graded.
How To Read the Amazing Colored Course Schedule
Look at Week 1 - the one that begins on Monday 1/7. There's a putrid green item "Intro to the Course. Chatfield Ch.1". This color means that Moshell is lecturing about the book chapter named here. Chatfield is the Microsoft Project book, and Chapter 1 has some general info about what a project is. So the first hour will be taken up by the general intro to the course - the stuff we're talking about right now - and by discussions of this chapter.
The second hour is a darker green and says "D1: RFP (Request for Proposals.) This color runs across the page while zigzagging downward, and represents a thread of activity.
The Group Process. You will see from the schedule, that on Tuesday 1/7 (that's today!) I will present to you the concept of an RFP, and a template or prototype for one. You are then immediately going to WRITE an RFP of your own - I'll show you how. We will be working in groups of four people during the first half of the semester, but in a highly structured manner. It goes like this:
1) Each member of your group will write an RFP, based on the template I provide and on a requirement that I provide to you. Each member must provide their draft to all the other members (by posting it on your Web Site) for reading and note-taking by Monday, 1/14, 5:00 PM. This will be posted at the url yourURL/project1/RFP.
2) On Thursday 1/17, one group will serve as the "guinea pigs" for an in-class "RFP workshop". I will lead the discussion and show you how to analyze each of the individual's RFP drafts, so as to pull together the group's common RFP. Each of your groups will then have separate meetings to do a similar process, so as to create the common RFP from all the drafts prepared by each individual.
3) Your common RFP must be posted on your group's site by Friday 1/25 at 5:00 PM, and e-mail sent to the team which is to be your "contractor".
Peer Evaluation. An important part of this course is learning how to fairly evaluate your fellow students' work, and to have your own evaluated. Peer evaluations do contribute to your grade. However, it is the evaluator's grade rather than the one being evaluated, which is affected. Your ability to provide helpful feedback is much more important than the "good or bad" aspects of the feedback. We're all trying to climb the mountain together.
Enough words. Let's get on with Lecture 1 - Request
for Proposals.