Windover Exercise (Thinking in Screens)

1. Read the article as a print text (you should have already done this).

2. Look for and mark the text for “centers of gravity” or discrete chunks that may make separate screens or "lexias"

Then, With a group of three or four

3. As a group, choose one chunk to focus on

4. Open up the electronic version of the article and copy the chunk of text you've chosen onto a blank HTML page in Dreamweaver. (If you're viewing this page with Internet Explorer, you'll need to right-click on this link to choose to open it with Word.). Save the page on someone's Zip disk.

5. With the group, decide how the text should be edited to stand on its own: rewritten to unify it internally? shortened? supplemented with other chunks from the original print text? reorganized? What considerations go into editing a text to be one "node" in a hypertext for the screen?

6. Look for ways the text could be visualized with white space, headings, sidebars, etc.

7. Do a Google search for some kind of image to put with the text (maybe not the most obvious one, but something that draws out and underlines some detail, some idea, even something between then lines). Download the image and place it on the page with the text

8. Talk about how you would rewrite the text in light of the picture. The idea is that the picture and the text speak to one another—that they’re actually parts of the same visual/verbal composition.

9. Think about a title for the page. What words would you use to link to this page from other pages in this hypertext? (Something clever? literal? engaging? clear? suggestive? descriptive? intriguing?). Put this link anchor label in the "Title" box at the top of the Dreamweaver workspace.

10. Work with your group to put it all together and post it to somebody's "exercises" folder with the name of everyone who worked on it at the bottom.

11. Post the URL of your page to Home Town Screens with the names of your group members in the first line of the message so it will appear in the title

Day 2

1. Spend another 10 minutes working in your groups tweaking your page. Look at other pages via the Webx discussion "Home Town Screens" to look for opportunities to create "embedded" links in your text to the other group's pages.

2. Individually, as journal entry # 4, make a list of the pages by topic. What's the focus of each one?

3. Look at how the pages mingle image(s) with the words. How does this influence your sense of the page's focus, feeling and meaning?

4. If you were making a menu of links for all these pages as one hypertext, what short, verbal "anchor" would you write for each page? What order would you put them in?

Day 3

1. Look at your list of menu "anchors" for the various pages of the class's collaborative hypertext of the Windover piece. Type them into a Word document.

2. Now, think about a unifying title and tag line that would go in a banner at the top of all the pages. The title should say more than just "Windover" or "Hometowns." It should suggest what the hypertext says about either of these things, what's interesting here, what the visitor will get if she clicks into the hypertext and starts reading...

...but maybe that's too hard.
All these pages will written by separate committees. There may not be a unifying vision to these pages. So, you're free to drop one or two...or maybe even all but one to arrive at the unifying vision.

3. After you've written a title and tag line for the project, rewrite your list of menu anchors as if you were also rewriting the pages they represent. How could you tweak these various pages so that they were all focused on working with your unifying title and vision?