I thought I would try Dreamweaver's Spry Widgets in making the on-line syllabus for my POLS 248: Politics of Development (... go ahead, take a look, let me know if it works on your computer). There are a few advantages to using widgets in building a course website.

First, the widgets are drag and drop, with very little tweaking needed. The only thing that I adjusted using the CSS inspector was the color scheme. That took about five seconds.

Second, the widgets allow for cut and paste. So one can just dump content into each category from an MS Word document. This improves the workflow, which is what I am trying to work on since I am hoping to make all three of my course websites ready next term (Unfortunately, I need to make both hard and soft copies of items like the syllabus because students still seem to want a physical copy of the syllabus on the first day of class. The idea of a paperless classroom is still a few years away).

Third, the end product avoids the need for endless scrolling (something that I personally find annoying) when hunting for specific information. I think the look is more tidy and functional than the alternative. In any case, most people are already used to tabbed and accordian style widgets if they commonly use any major news websites. I think the widget has a rather intuitive interface, but I will have to see how others react.

I have not tested any of this other platforms yet... so my fingers are crossed.

Labels: web technology