Web Teaching Guide: A Practical Approach to Creating Course Web Sites

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Summary: Not about teaching
Review: As a writer tasked with producing content for Web-Based Training, I need a book that would specifically detail how this kind of content differs from other content and training delivery methods. This is not this book. This book is basically a rehash of the author's Web Style Guide. Now the Web Style Guide is probably the best book out there for designing Web sites, but it has nothing to do with teaching. So if you want to know technical details about site organization and technology, this book will help. If you want to know how to develop and tailor your training content specifically for the Web, this isn't it. If somebody finds such a book, please let me know!

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Summary: An essential resource for creating Web course sites.
Review: Horton provides thoughtful, real-world advice for educators who want to create useful and enriching online resources to support their classroom instruction or to create distance education courses. The book is full of detailed, practical advice for creating well-designed and media-rich sites, with a pragmatic eye on the limited resources and technical support available to most teachers. The book includes many examples of educators who created excellent sites without spending a fortune, without lavish amounts of technology, and without a supporting cast of Web design professionals. Best of all, Horton avoids the breathless "revolutionary" boosterism and pretentious rhetoric of most other references for creating online teaching sites. Horton assumes that her audience already knows *how* to teach, and provides a broad overview of the Web technology and techniques useful for K-12 teachers, college professors, and corporate trainers. If you teach on the Web, you need this book.

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Summary: Outstanding cover of digital-teaching tools
Review: Horton's work has appeared between dozens of books covering Internet teaching. While the others focussed in three or four matters, Sarah's piece of state-of-the-art remains a valuable source for many of us looking for an integral approach as a whole. An it's amazingly written!!.

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Summary: Concise, well focused guide for teachers
Review: I really liked this book for its tight focus on the best design and technology methods for creating educational materials for the Web. Ironically, I like Horton's book for the same reason the previous reviewer didn't: it's tightly focused on Web teaching techniques.

I've been teaching for years; I don't need the bloated, wandering discussions of teaching philosophy and academic computing policy issues that clot so many books on teaching and technology. Just give me a clear, concise, thoughtful overview of what's possible on the Web, and *I'll* decide what's best for me and my students. Horton does that--very well.

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Summary: Great for the newbie
Review: I teach a workshop at the University of California that references this book liberally and I always recommend that my attendees purchase a copy of their own. The workshop focuses on how to build a course web site from the ground up on your own.

I am a web developer, not an instructor, but have found the information contained in this book has been invaluable to the instructors that I train. It contains a lot of good common sense web design that is focused on instructional, not commercial, information distribution.

For the pedagogical view of instructional technology there are several other texts (and electronic newsletters) that do expand on integration more than this single book does. But what this text does do well is take the technical elements that will make a course web site a success and explain them in plain, accessible language.

Whether K-12 or a University Professor, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in moving their materials to the web, but who isn't quite sure how to start. The tips and recommendations listed here will make your work effecient and, more importantly, usable.

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Summary: Sort of, but not quite...
Review: This book was written Sarah Horton, the co-author of a very (and deservedly so) popular Web Style Guide, and its accompanying website. Unfortunately, unike its predecessor (which still is a 5 star read), this book disappoints. It's not that it is not useful -- it might be for some people -- but it's nowhere near the quality of the previous title. Technical issues add little new material.

A notable, if somewhat surprising, drawback of this book is that it seems to have been written from the perspective of a technology administrator (or "technology specialist", if you prefer), and not a faculty member experienced in teaching in a non-computer-related discipline. It noticeable e.g., in the sections which discuss copyright issues. The author emphasizes the publishers' interests and bottom line, and includes a few tables with restrictive interpretations of "fair use gudelines" (in the form similar to those encouraged by various publishing consortia whose revenue is at stake here). But often there is a difference between what most publishers would like us to, and what the actual letter and intent of the law allows us to do, and, to benefit students and instructors, this fact should be discussed and clearly explained in a book like this (it isn't). There is a rather cursory mention of protecting faculty's own authorship interests in developing the sites, and no specific analysis of existing institutional policies on this issue is included, although they have been widely discussed and often recently adopted at some universities (the mention of those issues on pp. 101-102 is indeed vague). Students' rights to their own work are discussed in mere 12 lines on p. 105. There are other problems. Parts of the book deal with impractical and arcane issues which will require some server management expertise (e.g., using streaming media) or graphic design and programming expertise. It is unlikely that faculty members will need this information (at least in the form in which it is presented), and even less likely they will be able to use it without extensive professional support and very substantial funding.

In summary, for practical advice on how to meaningfully and wisely incorporate technology into college teaching, I much prefer the concise chapter in the "The Chicago Handbook for Teachers" (Chicago UP, 1999) with advice better integrated with other teaching-related issues, clearly written from a college instructor's perspective. For technical advice on how to build a stand-alone class website on your own, a general web design book such as R. Williams's excellent "Non-designer's Web Book," or even Horton's own "Web Style Guide," seem to be better choices.