BLACKBOARD, WEBPAGE, AND DIGITAL RÉSUMÉ
Don Drumtra and R. E. Wyllys

Assignment Title: Blackboard, Webpage, and Digital Résumé.

Participation: Individual.

Format:
    (1) Blackboard message.
    (2) HTML Webpage in your iSchool account--any format you choose.
    (3) Digital Résumé (as an HTML-format Webpage) linked to your Webpage—any professional format you choose

Submission Method:
    (1) Send test email message from Discussion Board and update your Discussion Board profile, as described below.
    (2) Load your Webpage image, and résumé to your iSchool account. The Webpage must contain links to the image and résumé.
    (3) Email the URL of your Webpage to the course emailbox.

Maximum points: 2.

Introduction: The goals of our asking you to provide a personal Webpage and biographical information are (1) to help you become better acquainted with each other and (2) to help you get started building a Digital Résumé for yourself, in preparation for using this résumé later on in seeking jobs and in other ways.

The information listed in your Digital Résumé will be available to the Internet in general—and will, after a while, be picked up by Web crawlers (such as Google)—, but the URL of your résumé will be initially protected through a closed topic on the discussion board so it will not initially be easily available. Nevertheless, you can choose not to provide specific personal information if you do not desire. We encourage each of you to share what you are comfortable with and to talk with others, the TAs, and the professor in person, via email, or on the discussion board during (or even after) the course. All of us will be glad to discuss the merits of posting particular types of information. Mr. Ron Pollock, Director of iSchool Career Services, is available by appointment to go over your résumé, in order to tailor it to providing information that potential employers will want to know. (He is also a great person to know and work with.)

Goals: The goals of this assignment are:

• To help you gain familiarity with Blackboard.
  
  
• To help you gain experience in building a Website.
  
  
• To help you learn basic scanning techniques and how to post a scanned image.
  
  
• To provide your LIS 386.13 students colleagues with biographical information on yourself.
  
  
• To help you gain experience in developing a résumé to marketing your background and experiences in preparation for future employment.
  
  
• To give you a start on amplifying and improving your initial Digital Résumé and keeping it continually up-to-date as you progress through your master's-degree program. When you are nearing graduation and want to start seeking a post-graduation job, you will be able to take your up-to-date Digital Résumé and post it to the Career Services Review Résumés Website. (Indeed, even if you currently have a professional job which you will be continuing after graduation, or to which you will be returning, you will find it useful to have a current résumé handy at all times, for you never know when an unexpected job opportunity might arise.)
  

Tasks: For this assignment, you will:

1. Read the tutorial information available on Blackboard about how to use it.
   
   
2. Practice using the board in the Play Room discussion forum by posting at least one message for other students.
   
   
3. Read the information on Posting a Résumé on the Career Services Website (CSW). (You do not have to submit your résumé to the CSW for posting as part of this course, but you may do so if you wish.) You are encouraged to make an appointment during the semester with Mr. Ron Pollock, Director of iSchool Career Services, in order to talk with him to learn about and understand the help that he and his staff can provide you. You can send him an email at careers@ischool.utexas.edu.
   
   
4. Develop a Webpage. You are not required to use any particular piece of software in preparing your résumé; we recommend Dreamweaver because of its convenience and ease of use once you become familiar with it, but there are other programs that can be used for preparing Webpages, including FrontPage (which is part of Microsoft Office Suite) and Microsoft Word. Please note that although Word can produce HTML-format pages acceptable for this assignment, you should be aware that Word's HTML pages tend to use Microsoft-specific coding that non-Microsoft browsers may display in ways not intended by the author. See the IT Lab tutorial, Converting a Microsoft Word (2000) Document to HTML, for details. Also see the section below on Hints.
   
   
• Your Webpage must include a photograph of you or, if you are opposed to posting a photo of yourself, of some other appropriate subject. This involves either (1) your obtaining and providing a digital photograph of yourself or of some other appropriate subject (IT Lab equipment is available to assist in this part of the task), or (2) your scanning and posting a copy of a film photograph of yourself or of something else. Note that the picture file must be in either GIF or JPEG format. Some scanners will allow you to scan directly into at least one of these formats. With other scanners you may need to convert your picture from the file format produced by the scanner into either GIF or JPEG format. For the conversion, Windows users can use Microsoft Photo Editor (which comes with the Microsoft Office Suite), and Macintosh users can use QuickTime, which is part of the Mac OS X operating system, or Fireworks (best) which is available in the IT Lab or in a package with Dreamweaver from Campus Computers. (The Lab has scanners and classes on using Dreamweaver and Fireworks.)
  
  
• As a minimum, your Webpage must include the following (the order is not important):
  • Your previous education.
  • Your previous work experience.
  • Your specialization (school libraries, archives, PCS, information architecture, etc.) and semesters completed.
  • Your career goals. (If you don't know, just list what you are thinking about.)
  • Where you are from (home town, last place you lived, etc.) or a short biography.
  • Professional organizations you belong to (GLISSA [everyone], ALA, SAA, ASIST, ARMA, ACM, GSA, etc.)
  • Publications (if any).
  • Occupation while a student (business, TA, RA, lab assistant, etc.)
    
  
  
5. Prepare your initial Digital Résumé as an HTML-format Webpage. You may also post additional formats if you so desire. Sample résumés are available at:
   • http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/careers/rev_res.html and
   • http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/webshare.html.
     
     
6. Place your Webpage, image, and initial Digital Résumé in your personal iSchool account under the public_html directory (or a webpage subdirectory). Be sure there is a link from you Webpage to your résumé.
   
   
7. Change file permissions so they are accessible to Web users.
   
   
8. Send the URL of your Webpage to the course emailbox so that the TA may post it to a closed topic on the discussion board.
   
   
9. It is okay if you do not provide a fully professional Webpage and Digital Résumé by the due date of this assignment, but you must have made a reasonable start on a Digital Résumé and have provided some text and a photo on the Webpage. You should let us know whenever you make significant improvements in your Digital Résumé as we progress through the semester.

Hints:

Using a Webpage-Preparation Program (Recommended)
A good, but not the only, way of getting your Webpage and Digital Résumé paper into HTML format is to use Dreamweaver (this excellent Webpage-preparation program is available in the iSchool Information Technology Laboratory; see also the very helpful IT Lab tutorial on Dreamweaver). If you prefer, you may acquire a copy of Dreamweaver from the Campus Computer Store at an educational-discount price. There are also other Webpage-preparation programs: e.g., Microsoft FrontPage (which many of you may already have, since it is part of the Microsoft Office Suite), or freeware programs such as PageBuilder, which is available from Yahoo!. Note: IT Lab staff members may be able to provide only very limited help with Webpage-preparation programs other than Dreamweaver.

Using Microsoft Word (Word can do the job in its own Microsoft-centric fashion, but is not recommended)
This is an alternative to using a Webpage-preparation program. This alternative is somewhat more complicated, and we do not recommend it, though we recognize that it can produce the desired results. Many students have had problems getting their photo to appear using Microsoft Word. The alternative is to prepare your Digital Résumé in Microsoft Word and save it from Word as a Webpage, i.e., in HTML format. If you do this, you should check the appearance of the resultant Webpage in Internet Explorer or Netscape; if you need to make changes, you may want to view the HTML source, which both Internet Explorer and Netscape allow you to do, in order to see how your Webpage is set up.

Furthermore, whenever MS Word embeds an image in a document and then saves the document in HTML format, Word insists on storing the image file(s) in a subdirectory that it creates under the directory where the document itself is stored; Word gives this subdirectory a name based on the name of the document without an extension (i.e., without ".doc" or "html"). For example, when you insert an image in your paper and then save the paper as a Webpage named "mypaper.html", Word will store the image in a subdirectory named "mypaper_files". (Word also arbitrarily renames the images in an HTML document in sequence as "image001.jpg" [or image001.gif, etc.], "image002.jpg", etc.)

If you have used MS Word to prepare file "mypaper.html", then when you upload this file to your public_html directory, you will also have to create a subdirectory under the public_html directory and name it "mypaper_files" (without, of course, the quotation marks). Because UNIX is case-sensitive, in naming this subdirectory you will need to be careful to use uppercase and lowercase exactly as they appear in the subdirectory on your computer. Finally, you will have to upload the image files from the subdirectory named mypaper_files on your computer to the subdirectory named mypaper_files under your public_html directory on the iSchool server.

A mixed possibility, that some students have had more success with, is to produce the text in Word (without formatting) and then copy and paste it to Dreamweaver. Formatting, images, and links can then be added as desired avoiding the messy Microsoft HTML code.

Using Microsoft FrontPage (FrontPage is less inconvenient than using Microsoft word and can also do the job in its own Microsoft-centric fashion, but it is not recommended)
Microsoft FrontPage also has Microsoft-oriented eccentricities, and thus we do not recommend it, although we recognize that it can produce the desired results. If you choose to use FrontPage, we suggest that you pay careful attention to ensuring that the HTML-format files you place in your public_html directory use the 4-letter extension ".html" rather than the 3-letter extension ".htm" that FrontPage uses as its default extension. We recommend this on the basis of its being a preferred practice on the Web. It is easy to change the default extensions into ".html"; you just have to remember to do it.

Tutorials Available
The Tutorial Junction of the iSchool IT Lab provides tutorials on Dreamweaver and HTML. Also useful and concise is A Basic Set of HTML Tags.

Uploading Your Webpage
For uploading your file(s) to your public_html directory, you can use Dreamweaver's upload capabilities (or the comparable capabilities of other Webpage-preparation programs.)

If you are not using a Webpage-preparation program (e.g., if you chose to use MS Word to prepare your résumé), then for uploading we recommend that you use a Secure Shell program. If you are using Windows, we recommend SSH Secure Shell 3.1.0, which is available from BevoWare. If you are using a Macintosh, we recommend MacSSH, also available from BevoWare. The BevoWare Website notes that: "Current UT students can download BevoWare components, updates and upgrades online for free. The CD version of BevoWare is also available to current students as an optional $5 purchase from the Campus Computer Store."