The Story Behind This Course

Webpage Authoring
by Jo Anne Howell
Gavilan College

It's all in the code, according to Professor Jo Anne Howell from Gavilan College. And while it may not be the exciting secret code of bestselling airport novels or mystery movies, it's a capricious and exacting code that can turn hours of detailed HTML (HyperText Markup Language) work into either a brilliant website or into a garbled mass of font, color and graphics.

As a librarian, Jo Anne is familiar with using codes to put order to information, and, as a librarian, she's in a position to access the information superhighway and help others find their way. "I started in the library, my first love. For years, I was the reference librarian that helped instructors direct their students online, with modules that moved them from book catalogs to journal databases to word processing." said Jo Anne. "This experience led me to believe that any practice with computers was helpful for our students." Creating the individual modules for various classes was a natural lead-in to putting an entire class online.

Despite its focus on the basics, students don't find Jo Anne's introductory course easy. Our students are "a very untechie population," she explains. "Because this course is detail-intensive, I lose students over tiny problems. They forget to put a bracket or a slash mark in their code, and then nothing works. They are reluctant to send me their code until it works, which means they get frustrated and then fall behind," Jo Anne acknowledges. But most students appreciate the organization of the course.

Learning HTML code is like learning a new language - one that enables web pages to communicate with web browsers. Casual web authors often rely on shortcuts such as WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page authoring programs to translate formatted text to HTML. But, browsers evolve and web page authoring programs, such as DreamWeaver from Macromedia or FrontPage from Microsoft, vary in their interpretations of the code. This makes Professor Jo Anne Howell's introduction to HTML course an essential foundation for building web pages as well as advancing toward the more advanced web authoring dialects.

Jo Anne is open-minded about improvements. A suggestion made by several students was to find another free web hosting service. Angelfire, the free web-hosting service that she relied upon for her students who couldn't afford to purchase their own hosting, "put up entirely too many advertising banners, sometimes plastered right across the student's work, instead of above or below," said Jo Anne. "I'll find another place, but this will be an ongoing problem [with free hosting services]," said Jo Anne. Web sites and services change, disappear, or become otherwise inaccessible. From one minute to the next, a web resource can go from highly recommended to a mass of banner ads and animated gifs or even a dreaded 404 Page-not-found error.

Jo Anne is dedicated to helping students become information literate. In addition to the students she comes in direct contact with in her classes, as Distance Learning Coordinator, she is the go-to person for Gavilan's online students. Gavilan College is located in Gilroy, in rural California, south of the San Francisco Bay Area. "Our population is spread out over a large geographic area. We have low-income, working students that can't always arrange their lives to get to classes." She recounts also that her daughter, who lives outside Seattle, had a job, a new baby, and a desire to keep working on her college career. "Online courses worked perfectly for her."

"This course required an incredible amount of time and energy to create," reflects Jo Anne. "I love the idea that it could live on beyond the time that I'll be teaching it."

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Jo Anne Howell earned a Distance Education Certificate from UCLA. She graduated from San Jose State University with her B.A. and Masters Degree in Library Science, and received her A.A. from Cabrillo Community College in Aptos, CA.