Online Syllabus Not “Official” Enough? (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog)
I just got an e-mail from an administrative assistant who wanted a copy of the syllabus for one of my current courses. I sent her the URL of the “syllabus” page of the course website, as well as links to the “outline” and “projects” pages.
She responded that she couldn’t get the documents to print without the navigation bar at the top and the URL at the bottom — did I have a “clean” version that I could send as an e-mail attachment?
While I did some of the early drafting in a simple word processor, I didn’t design those syllabi as print documents that I then posted on my curricular weblog.
I did work on a special print-specific stylesheet, since printing from the default Movable Type template results in the rightmost inch of each page being cut off. I recognize that students will print pages in order to mark up and ponder, but I designed the whole site to be consulted and used online.
When I explained this to my correspondent, she cheerfuly said that she would just cut, paste, and photocopy in order to construct a paper-ready document out of the printed web pages.
Problem solved… though I’m still uncomfortable that the presence of navigation buttons at the top of a printed syllabus and a URL at the bottom seem to be challenges to the authority of a syllabus.
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Mike, in my experience, creating a document in WP and converting to HTML creates horribly bloated pages that are incredibly hard to edit to fit an existing style sheet. Dreamweaver has a feature designed specifically to remove the unnecessary junk that WP adds to HTML, but it doesn't get all of the additions.
You're right about HTML syllabi tending to take up quite a lot of printed pages. I do tend to cheat a bit, by reducing the type size just before I print. But the whitespace that is your friend online does cause increased tree consumption when printed.
And yes, the administrative assistant was probably just trying to make everything in a package look uniform.
Empathy: to you for the bureuacratic nonsense AND to the administrative assistant who now has to edit a document layout for you due to standardized business practices. This is a tricky subject. I guess it comes down to the fact that the syllabus isn't just for the classroom: Syllabi are institutional documents as much as they are tools for any particular class, so I can understand the admin asst's frustration with having to reformat the outre HTML document. I believe most campuses have loose formats or guidelines for syllabi that they expect followed for consistency's sake in major archives, program review portfolios, promotion portfolios, legal questions, instances when books are checked for accreditation, etc. To save myself (and others) any hassle, I always work on a WP first, and then save as HTML and edit afterward. That way I've got two versions of the same text. It's harder to format backward from HTML than it is to format forward from .rtf, in my opinion. And once I've got it in .rtf, it's easy to edit as a template for other classes or future revisions. True, the same could be said of any HTML or CSS style sheet, but the power of the word processor can't be beat. (I notice, too, that HTML syllabi are natural resource hungry, often running over ten pages when printed, when they could easily fit on four if processed with Word or some other WP.)
Well, aluding to my entry Save a Tree... (http://blogs.setonhill.edu/EvanReynolds/2004_08.html)
Someone has to save the trees--sorry you couldn't this time, Dr. Jerz. *he says, snickering as he prints out twenty pages of literature from his computer instead of blogging it* q':