Texts, etc.

Most of the course texts are available on the web (see below). However, two books are required, and I highly recommend some other supplies and software as well.

Books

Please purchase the following books from the bookstore of your choice.

Web-based texts

Most course readings are online. If you have difficulty reading from the computer, or if you wish to highlight or annotate the readings, please make arrangements to print out the articles. I will make arrangements with QuickPrinters if you want to purchase a course pack with all the readings.

Since most of the readings are online, I use the del.icio.us bookmarks manager to organize our reading lists. Del.icio.us provides network storage of bookmarks (handy if you use more than one computer) and allows “tagging” with any number of keywords. You can easily find new sites by looking at site-wide lists of tags or by searching the site.

For our purposes, I’ve tagged all of my bookmarks which I think are useful for Computers & Writing, including required readings, with the 480 tag. I’ve tagged all required readings following the concepts which are the focus of the course.

By clicking on any one tag in my del.icio.us, you can see all of the links I have which relate to any of the concepts we’re working with this semester—both assigned readings and other online content. For example, clicking usability shows all the links I’ve tagged with “usability.”

You can take this one step further; among other things, the options in the grey bar at the top of the page allow you to see what every del.icio.us user has tagged usability.

If you don’t mind a little typing, you can see which items are tagged with multiple links. (That’s how I narrowed down the reading list for the course.) For example, type in the url http://del.icio.us/dilger/web+usability to see at items I’ve tagged with "web" and "usability." Or try http://del.icio.us/tag/web+usability to see the same results for all del.icio.us users.

Of course, if you make your own del.icio.us account, you can do all of this yourself!

Supplies

While it’s not necessary if you can become comfortable with living on the network, a USB flash drive can be useful for bringing computer files to campus for presentations and/or work in computer classrooms.

You should also make arrangements to back up your work via CD-ROM or some other means.

Software

I suggest you install the following software on your home computer. See my del.icio.us for more recommendations.