My students finished their first project last week: it’s a collaborative, subjective guide to the university, where each student has made a single page with a photo of and text related to something they love or hate or see every day. In addition each student had to make an entrance page to this material, either individually or in a group. Here’s what they’re supposed to have learnt doing this:

• basic HTML, uploading a file to a server, validating your code
• how to take a photo, transfer it to the computer, save it for web, upload it, embed it in an HTML document
• how to write a text for the web that’s enjoyable to read
• ways of thinking about organising content

While lots of the individual pages are excellent and I love how creative they’ve been, I’m particularly happy about the many different kinds of start pages the students made. Pedagogically I think this is great – it made it easy to talk today about how these different approaches work in different ways, and hopefully it opens up possibilities for the students rather than prescribes. Here’s one of my favourite start pages: Utend¯rs innend¯rs bygninger. It sets a very different tone to this (or this or this) geographic organisation, doesn’t it? Here’s one where a Douglas Adams sentence is used as a rather cryptic organisational principle, and one where neat categories are annotated and clearly presented. Or perhaps you’d prefer a list? Here’s a collection of screen shots of 15 of the pages, and here’s a list organised by author name, category and title. Or, depending on your goals here, you might find a division by gender of the author interesting: men and women authors.

The project is not a polished, finished work. The students were instructed that if the entrance pages they envisioned were too ambitious technically that was fine, they could just describe what they couldn’t yet do. The site doesn’t even have an index.html page yet. It’s a bunch of trying, failing and succeeding and there would be plenty to do to complete it. I had a lot of fun poking around in there, though, and so might you if you’re familiar with the University of Bergen. Soon I’ll make a proper front page for it. Soon. Here’s the entrance page.