Week Five Guide

Welcome to Week Five! Here's how to get started.

1. Read both Chapter Five about Content Assessment and Treatment and Chapter Six in the textbook about information architecture.
2. Read the additional reading linked below.
3. View the multimedia examples assigned to you and develop a short flowchart that accurately depicts the organization of the application.
4. Describe free multimedia development tools.

Here are the objectives for Week Five -- in other words, the most important concepts I want you to "get" by the end of our first week:

1. Describe the importance of good information architecture for multimedia development
2. Develop a flowchart that describes the organization of a multimedia product

Let's Talk

This week, Chapter Five of our textbook discussed content treatment, which we discussed briefly last week.

Chapter Six describes information architecture, including flowcharts that describe the information structure of a multimedia application. File naming conventions are also addressed, but that is a concept I'm sure you are already familiar with from your work.

Developing multimedia can quickly get out of hand if you don't have a plan in place to control the sequence of content, such as a flowchart, and a plan to control versions of files that develop as drafts are continually revised. One way to manage this is through version control, as in file-naming conventions that you use to identify the author, source, date, and revision number of a file.

Another way to manage files is through a content management system. The book mentions some free ones, like Drupal and Joomla. A content management system is an enterprise level software application that manages multiple content files and keeps everything in one place, accessible to workers with the appropriate permissions. A CMS basically manages workflow in a complex production environment.

Online Reading This Week -- Wikipedia

1. Take a moment and read this Wikipedia article about content management systems.
2. Next, examine this list of CMSs. Note the categories of open-source software and software-as-a-service. We'll talk more about content management systems in class.

For Class Discussion Monday, September 30

See the sidebar for this information.

Assignments for Week Five

• Due by COB Monday, September 30 -- Multimedia Interview
• Participate in Webex discussion on Monday night, September 30, from 8pm-9:30pm.