Oops!

I got way too caught up in how much I liked the class to even talk about what I did individually on the project. Here goes.... Mainly for the Dormland Security and Hoosier News projects, I was on-screen talent as the anchor for Hoosier News. I also did the preliminary...eh hem very very preliminary stages of the story board for the news broadcast shooting. I also drew up the "Training" page for the Dormland Security website and I wrote the contents of the page. For the Dormland Security campaign, we had an idea to make a video that was a lesson on how to lock your door and I wrote the script for that based on a flight attendant's speal about fastening your seat belts. That's as much as I can remember right now.

~Sharayah

I miss our class already!

I have to agree with many of you in that I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I walked into the computer lab our first day. Fortunately, Thom didn't really know either. He started us off with "We, the Media," which gave us some insight into ways individual citizens can become reporters with the rise of digital cameras and video cameras. It also taught those of us who are sort of technology illiterate how important new technology is in transferring information in this up and coming knowledge-based economy. Although I didn't love the quizzes every day, I learned the material better because I knew I needed to know it. I can't say I was psyched about the book reports either, but I must admit that "Everything bad is actually good for us" gave me a seriously new perspective on video games and the virtual world.

Although I was frustrated by the spontaneity of some of the projects as well as the complexity of the web coding, I certainly learned a lot that I never thought I would learn. Also, because of all the group work, I made some friends I may not have made. Looking back, I'm definitely glad I took this class. My thoughts about the class are so positive and I would encourage anyone who is or isn't interested in media and current events to take the class. In the beginning I was frustrated with getting assignments at the last minute of class when we had no clue what they meant. For example, as we're all walking out the door one day Thom yells, "Write one page on Lonleygirl 15 for next time!" No one even knew what he was talking about, but we figured it out on our own and learned something about how to get yourself out there without going through Hollywood. Over the course of the semester, Thom's tangents about anything and everything grew on me and I've come to enjoy story time with Thom, who has done just about anything one can think of. Thom is an enthusiastic professor and I'm grateful to have taken such an enjoyable class with him.

Also, I'm really happy with how far the campaigns went with such little experience on our part. I loved the group work and it's neat to be aware of what we can do. I learned a great deal in this class in a really fun way. Thanks a lot Thom for your enthusiasm and your inspiration, and of course all your help with the technology.

Have a wonderful break everyone and stay in touch!

Love,
Sharayah

Jason Johnson

I would have to say that I loved this class as a whole. The project at the end was pretty cool, though I think more direction would have been nice. I kind of felt like I was just kind of shooting in the dark most of the time. I didn't really know what we were supposed to be doing or where we were supposed to be going. The group meeting outside of class were helpful for figuring out where we were on the project, but we probably should hav met more often. We usually met at least once a week, which seemed like alot, but in hind-sight, it wasn't enough. I liked using the web sites as kind of a central focus, but then the central focus seemed to become the video, then the group presentation, then the paper, then the group presentation again. I'm still interested to see how that goes.

Review of Citizen Media for Social Change

After the first day of Citizen Media for Social Change, I was seriously considering dropping the class. I e-mailed Thom to confirm that I had made a mistake in signing up for it: "Dear Professor Gillespie, I had no idea we would have to know so much about computers for this class... I think I'm in way over my head!" Thom replied: "You'll be fine." So, I took a deep breath and took his word for it, and although at some points I felt I had no idea what I was doing, I am very glad I stuck with the class. It actually ended up being my favorite one of all. It was one of those classes where the professor was actually interesting, and the lessons didn't put me to sleep. I liked reading the book "We the Media," and the quizzes on it weren't too bad either. Thom has been so many places and done so many things. He's so knowledgeable of so many different aspects of the subject, too. Any problem that surfaced, Thom would show us an example of something similar that had happened in previous classes, and how the problem was resolved. He was also very patient with us.

We spent a lot of time working on HTML. I believe that only a few people really conquered this, and to those who did, I applaud you. I was a little frustrated with HTML, but Thom was always available to help. When we were introduced to Dreamweaver, I was happy. I didn't quite get it at first, but I think now I sort of have the hang of it. I put together the website for Dormland Security using Photoshop and Dreamweaver. I wasn't quite sure what I was doing and had to seek help from Thom outside of class. I think the Dormland Security website is a little bit aesthetically boring. I wish I could have thought of something else to make it more interesting to look at. Overall, though, I am proud of myself for succeeding in putting it together. Also, I like our website logo, that David created. We had all brainstormed to come up with the logo, but we ended up picking David's design. I liked working in my group. Everyone was very eager to participate. I felt like I needed to be on my toes in order to contribute something significant to the group, because I was always getting ideas after others in the group had already gotten them. My major contributions to the group were putting together the final website and filming the video. Overall, I had a very good experience in this class.

~Alison Stake

Citizen Media and My Campaign: A Learning Experience

Four months ago, I walked into a Windows computer lab, not knowing what to expect. What did “Citizen Media” mean? Citizen media is more than just a class and a book title. It is a knowledge base. In this class, I learned more about my society than I have in any history class; I learned more about my abilities to recognize and understand societal movements like those of the modern, interactive media era; I learned a new language: html; I learned how to interact with a group to produce something truly special: a campaign to make our campus safer, a campaign to promote smarter decisions regarding late night transportation at IU.

At first I seemed skeptical of this campaign project. In high school, I had always been the type to hate group projects because I always had to do all the work, but not this time. Citizen Media was a truly unique learning environment in this way, which, in turn, fostered the production of a complex, multi-faceted campaign promoting the use of a bus called the “Midnight Special,” a bus that runs Thursday thru Saturday night from 11:00 pm until 4:00 am. The idea of having an open-ended project where we could formulate our own plan of action regarding how to reach out to IU students incited motivation and sparked our creativity.

Every member of my group contributed to all aspects of the campaign, a characteristic that made this experience exciting and opened my eyes to forming a system of equitable work distribution in the learning environment. As such, I think it is unfair to say “I did this” or “I did that” but accurate to say, “I contributed to this” and “I contributed to that.” For instance, I was a primary contributor to the “Hoosier News” skit, as I spent many hours over the course of two intense days working to edit the segment. I do, however, acknowledge that many of my group mates also contributed to this piece. I also contributed to the “Drunk Bus” commercial as I wrote the skit and offered my ideas to the film and editing crew when necessary or called upon for advice. So, while everyone else might be trying to remember what he or she specifically created, why not simply explain what I was a part of? I know I was a major contributor to the designing the “Drunk Bus” campaign, but I believe we all can say we were all a part of the whole.

P.S. Thom, I know you asked for suggestions, so here it goes. Start the campaigns early! Like the first week. I know you wanted to let us explore the media first, but there’s no time to wait. These projects take a long time and you should get your students started on the projects, then start teaching them about topics like html and flash. Perhaps in class, they can begin integrating these techniques into their campaigns. This way the Citizen Media students will have enough time to design well thought out, effective, and complete campaigns by the end of the semester that utilize all of the skills taught in this class.

Josh

S104 overview

Generally speaking, I think that this class really helped me to push my imagination. At the beginning of the course I had no idea how to design a site and put it up onto the web. However, by the end of the course I designed a site consisting of 5 pages without using former templates. I think that Thom really helped us to see our potential. It's nice to see what we can all do when we put our individual talents together. Having people who are expericenced with design elements, video recording, and editing was really beneficial to our group, because we were successful in many aspects of media.
Although I think that we could have had more experience with dreamweaver, we accomplished as much as we could within our given time frame. My only critizism of the class is that I think we would have been able to accomplish more, if we were introduced to the project earlier. I think that this class is a good intro media classe, because now I have a good idea of what aspects of media I am interested in, and I can see where the skills we learned in this class can take me.
-andrea

sorry forgot my name

sorry to take up all of the prime blogging space...but the thing didnt post my name!!

anyways that last blog posted by "whoseyournews" is me.....BETSY!!!

What I did in S104!!

here is the list of what i contributed to the whole campaign process (i'll try to remember as many as possible!!!) keep in mind these are in no particular order (haha)

first of all, i was a full time member of the drunk bust group serving as the creative supervisor (haha, we all made up funny titles for ourselves). I attended all of the group meetings and shared my two cents like a good little group member should. I helped edit the hoosiernews broadcast along with Caleb and Taylor. I wrote the credits for the hoosiernews broadcast. i helped ms. beth riley write the about page on the drunk bus website as well as helped try to start up the site in the beginning. I also contributed my ideas for the campaign (just like all of my other groupies did) and some notable ones that i am especially proud of are the dbus ping pong balls and the dbus cups. I also worked with beth and kate on some promotional ideas...we made a playlist for our dbus imix, we came up with a design for a t-shirt, and i am a proud member of our dbus facebook group. Finally, I assembled the Final Presentation packet of all of our campaign information into a cute little packet. I also made little flash cards for all of my group members to look at during our presentation. I also was in charge for adding drunk bus to wikipedia and i am working on linking some of our info like the website, the zazzle site to the page.

so i think thats all and i just want to say...that my group was awesome and i had tons of fun working with them on the dbus campaign. love you guys!!!

Evaluation/Final Report

Thom,
I'm not quite sure exactly what we are supposed to put in these blogs, but from what I gather, you want to know what we did individually, what we learned, and how the class was. So, that is what I am going to share.

I was part of the Drunk Bus group. Like everyone else in the group, I was involved in the brainstorming of how we were going to get our campaign off the ground. Together we all pitched in ideas for the website, which Kyle then took and produced. I thought of the idea to have a little flash animation involving the trash can, which led to the rest of the group adding their own comical scenarios. Unfortunately, we were too inexperienced with flash to make this work in the amount of time we had. I also suggested raising awareness of the midnight express by organizing to have posters of bus routes and bus route pamphlets on the buses and at stops. I also thought it would be a good idea to put our slogan "Do you ride it every night?" on the scrolling marquis of the other buses on campus. However, due to time constraints, we were unable to make it to that stage of the campaign. Having the other aspects of our campaign being handled by the other group members, I worked on creating a website fof Hoosier News with Jason. Not having a clue what I was doing, I was very pleased with the outcome of the website. Although it is fairly basic, it says what it needs to, and I now have a little more knowledge of how to make a website.

I came into this class completely inexperienced in the realm of media. I definitely feel like I have a better understanding of it now, but I am still a little shakey on how to use programs such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Although we only had so much time to learn everything, I feel that what I did learn was a good introduction to more advanced productions further down the road.

All in all, I really enjoyed this class. I really do wish we had more time for you to really get us experienced with all the different programs, but that is obviously unrealistic. Perhaps it would be best to get into the different programs earlier on in the semester, so that more can be fit into the class. This class has definitely inspired me to look into more media classes, and hopefully I will be able to take another of your classes in the future.

-Nathaniel Gold

CM for SC

I'm going to miss everyone! Sorry to be emotional here, but I learned to much from you guys- we are all so different and working in this environment where we are forced to use eachother to create something has made me realize how great it is to work will other people. During Dormland Security's first group meeting I remember not being able to concentrate because I kept thinking about how different each of us was and how weird it was that this class brought us together to work on a project. But by the close of this semester, I felt like I've gotten to know almost everyone- from my original confusion friend Kate to STL Sharahyah- I love hearing what each of you have to say. I think the enviornment was the best thing about the course because I got to learn what it's like to HAVE to work with people to get something finished, even if it seems confusing or impossible. It was cool to see how easy it was so begin a campaign with a few talented people. I also enjoyed the books we read on the side. It was nice to choose something to write about that interests me because it is easier to learn when you love what you are learning.

Things that could be changed... I don't want to be repetitive so I'd say obviously a little more organization. It would be okay to simply touch on some subjects as long as we focused on the more relavent points concerning the topic. Sometimes it seemed like topics did not exactly tie in together, but on the other hand some of the best ideas came from random thoughts and subjects.

I was in the Dormland Security group. I participated in all of our meetings, and was "on screen talent" for Hoosier News. (Nope, I've never taken acting.) I also held up cue cards with Caleb, which was more difficult than it seems! Overall, I've had a lot of fun with the campaign and I'm so glad that I got to meet all of you. Thom is definatelty one of those professors that you remember throughout your life. I'LL MISS YOU GUYS!

Seriously, we should have Citizen Media reunions.

My Very Detailed Evaluation... Apologies

In my evaluation for the course, I’m not going to focus so much on what I did for the campaign, but more on what worked and what didn’t worked for certain aspects of the course. I will try not to be as long-winded as my friend Kyle, but this may take a bit of time to read through. I split Citizen Media for Social Change into four categories: the course, the equipment, the final project, and the professor.
When I signed up for this course last summer, I had no idea what this class entailed. Now after completing a semester of the class, I feel like I’m just grasping some of the concepts that Thom taught in the class. Citizen Media for Social Change was an awesome course and the material that we covered (from the books we read to the videos we watched on the Internet) lead to me really getting into new media. I thought that learning basic html was important, but I thought that this shouldn’t have taken up as much class time, so other applications could be focused on like Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash, and maybe even, FinalCut. To add time to the course, I think the books were important to read, but I could have read those books much faster than the time that was allotted to us.
The class environment was perfect. Like Kyle said, it was great to be out of a 300-person lecture class and into a class where we had more interaction with the professor. I really like seeing all the computers on the first day of class also. The only criticism I may have on equipment available to us was the lack of cameras available and other audio and lighting tools that could have made the newscast look pretty professional. If not professional, it would have at least been fun to play around with the stuff.
I think the final projects turned out better than I could have imagined, especially with the small amount of time we had to throw something together. It was amazing to see everyone’s talents come together to produce the final project. The only criticism I can express is the same as everyone else’s – time.
Finally, I have come to Thom. I think when you are first starting into college everyone wants to find that professor who inspires them and makes them think differently. Thom was that guy for me and I bet for a lot of the class. What I noticed about Thom was he took away any shyness that was in the classroom and he wanted people to speak up with what they were good at. The artists, the writers, the editors, the actors… he knew we were talented and was just the guy to bring us together. Now when I think of Thom, I think of the Santa Claus in The Christmas Story. We were all a bunch of Ralphies sitting on his lap, intimidated to bring our ideas across. The only difference is when we told him our ideas he didn’t say, “You’ll shoot your eye out kid,” and kick us down the slide, he ran with our ideas.
Overall, I have little criticism for this course and only a positive assessment. The class worked. I actually wouldn’t mind staying in this one for another semester. Sorry for rambling on so long.

Thanks everyone.
Caleb

Sarah Greenberg: Review of Citizen Media

First off, I'd just like to say that I enjoyed this course very much. When I registered for classes back in the summer, I wasn't really sure what to expect with this one, but I was very pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed, actually, the books I read for the book reports (my favorite was definitely The Revolution Will Not be Televised) and of course, the group work for the final campaign. If I had to improve the course, I'd say that we probably should have started working on our campaigns earlier, maybe spent some time with video editing as whole class so everyone could be involved in that, and not spent so much time on css.
I worked on the Nap IU campaign. I helped gather information for the website, and with the rest of the gorup, brainstormed ideas of the webisite and planned out the story boards for the commercials. I also provided on-screen help for the commericials, but only my hands and body are actually visible on the film.
In early discussion in the napping group, we talked about actually having campus wide "nap time", handing out sleep masks and stuffed owls, hooting on buses, and lots of other stunts to increase interest and awareness. If we had started this earlier in the semester, maybe we would have been able to get started on this stuff also!

Citizen Media Review + Individual Role

I typed the individual role description before we decided to do the blog thing, so I just decided to include it with my review of the course. Anyway, this was with-out-a-doubt, my favorite course. I loved the small class size, being in a computer lab, talking about cool media related topics, and having a team oriented project. It was very refreshing to be in this learning environment compared to the 300 plus lecture. In addition, I loved working in groups toward a big project. Group dynamics are always interesting. As far as criticisms, I feel that we should have dove right into Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash. The first eight weeks were interesting as far as the books and articles we read, but I felt like we should’ve been learning more about tools that were required to carry out our campaigns on top of the reading. This would’ve prepared us more for the campaigns and given us the ability to do more. Overall though, I think if we had one more week of class, we probably could’ve been okay with our campaigns. As far as Thom goes… he is the man… enough said.
In the Drunk Bus campaign, my primary role was the illustrator. In addition, I worked as the web designer, and I was filmed in the Drunk Bus commercial. During that first class period when we began discussing campaign ideas, the Drunk Bus idea jumped out at me. At first I had no clue what the Drunk Bus was, and I was just attracted to the catchy name. Then, when I went to the “Midnight Special” link on the IU Bus website, I found out what we were talking about. The main motivation for me in this campaign was the message that we would be trying to send out: Don’t drink and drive, Get home safely. Drinking and driving is such a common problem and has affected many people where I live and in my life. To me, getting this message across and actually preventing those grave consequences would be worth all my effort. From here, I knew I wanted to commit to the project, and I began imagining what would really be effective in getting our message across. The method was really quite simple to me: make everything about this campaign cool. That is make everything in this project look appealing, funny, and creative to a college student. The first thing I thought of immediately was the actual bus. I wanted our bus to be pimped out with spinners, tints, fat rims, and all of those bells and whistles that college kids love. From the bus, I would be able to create an evident style for the project – a (hip, pimpmyride, graffiti, street) type of appearance/approach. This thing could be so cool. Then, I made the text logo in graffiti style. The design method that I took involved sketching my ideas onto paper first, then creating them digitally on the computer. So, I just experimented with my scanner and with Adobe Photoshop, and wound up with a cool looking bus and text logo. Then, Adobe Illustrator was introduced to me for designing things that would be more flexible and compatible with the web. At this point, I really got into the designing, the website being my focus. I wanted the site to be interactive and extremely visual rather than textual. I pictured the bus pulling up to a door in an ally with the logo graffitied on the wall. The top links would in the gutter of the building, and the door would be a portal for further animation. I saw the Drunk Bus bouncing with music notes streaming from the top and hot beats playing over the page. Again, I drew all of the pages in a notebook first and then recreated them in Illustrator. This process was so interesting for me because as I was designing, I was learning more and more about how to use the programs. It was a slow process, but rewarding nonetheless. In the end, I learned how to translate my illustrated pages into html using Dreamweaver. This process was difficult, but productive. We finally got our site up, plugged in the information we wanted, which was researched, summarized, written by the other group members, and it looked great! In the end, I felt so proud of my work. I think this project has opened a new interest for me in designing, and I hope to continue further in my exploration of design.

Kyle

Improving S104

I think this class was really very ineresting. We could have really improved our campaigns if we had started them earlier or had more time to continue working on them. Here we are at the last day of class, and we're finally ready to really put everything up on a website. What about all the great advertising ideas? We thought of passing out pingpong balls, tshirts, lanyards, and posters with our drunk bus logo and the website, but we were not able to even start these ideas until the websites were up. So if we had more time, then we could have really shot off with our ideas.

-Abby Schmiesing

*media with thom*

thom, you wanted feedback so here it is!!:
i really enjoyed this class and i would have to say that i learned so much. I wish we would have spent less time on some things and spent more time exploring other things. (that sounds really broad!!!) I really wished we would have gotten to post our own wikipedia definition and spent less time on css. I understand why we focused on css styles, but i think we probably could have barely brushed that and jumped right into dreamweaver and still would have gotten the jist. I think that if we would have started right away developing our campaigns, we would have been able to progress farther. Next time, maybe we could start each part of the campaign and learn how to use the technology as we went along.

I really enjoyed blogging and i am glad i have learned that skill because i know that will come in handy. I really like how you let us blog about whatever floated our boat.


All in all, I feel I really learned alot about the media and all the ways it is changing through this course. I think it also disciplined me to do things on my own which will prepare me for other classes throughout my college career.

betsy

My job in S 104

I was a member of the Drunk Bus group. Within this group, I helped in the early stages of website design and marketing ideas (tshirts, ping pong balls, etc. ). Then we decided that we first needed to set up a logo, so I and the rest of the group collaborated on ideas for a logo. In class, we decided to merge the different groups in a "news broadcast" called "Hoosier News". To do this, I went to the Monroe County Library to get training to use a video camera to be able to rent one out when needed. With this, I checked out and returned a videocamera 5 seperate times (dealing with the problem of too few cameras at the library, as well). I worked with the napping campaign, the drunk bus campaign, and the dormland security campaign to film their seperate "commercials".

-Abby Schmiesing

Citizen Media Evaluation

I think Citizen Media was refreshingly different from the usual lecture-type intro courses I've been taking. The first part of the class, when we worked on making our own websites, was a bit difficult at first--if you didn't immediately take to HTML (and I didn't), the fast pace of the lessons could be frustrating, but once I got the hang of things it was fun to see what I could do creatively. Doing the Dormland Security campaign was fun--in addition to coming up with the basic concept, I did some design work (on the website and logo) and turned in a successful performace as Field Correspondent. I was lucky enough to have my idea go from concept to reality, and I'm surprised how well the whole thing turned out. Overall, there was a lot to like about this class, but it seemed kind of schizophrenic; once we got settled into doing whatever project we were on, we'd drop it and go to something else. It would be interesting to see what kind of work people could do if the class took things a bit more slowly. Oh, and you rock, Thom.

--David

Campaign participation & future ideas

I was in the Nap IU campaign. I gathered useful information for my group's website; ways to nap, good times to nap, the benefits of napping. I also worked with my group to create commercials and ideas for a storyboard. I came up with our campaign's motto: Napping is a Hoot and also helped construct creative ways to display our commercials. After our ideas were complete, I was the "on-set help" for our commercials. I am visible in a few of the commercials but really did no acting. After the commercials were complete, I edited them. Aside from my group, I edited the news broadcast video for the Dormland Securities main video.
Obviously if we started our campaigns earlier they would have gone over smoother. I think if we had more time to learn about websites that more people would have been able to help create them. I think that our book reviews should have related more closely to our campaign, not other random topics, like comics. I think that having more class time to complete the campaign would have been more convenient because there were several class periods where we sat around and didn't get anything accomplished. Overall, with our time and money constraints I think that the campaigns were creative and well thoughtout.

Steve Rothkopf: Dormland Security

This class was very different than other classes I've taken in the past, mainly resulting from the fact that it is such a do-it-yourself, independent type of learning. The course truly treated us like adults. This is what I expected college to be like. I think Thom always had a way of making the class interesting and fun, mainly because he was so open to new and bizarre ideas. The class was also well constructed, I think, in that it used many different mediums to instruct. i.e. we had to do book reports, we took in-class quizzes, we blogged, and constructed web pages, and we planned campaigns. I do think, though, that we could have spent some more time on some topics, mainly constructing web pages. I understand that building web pages is difficult to learn in a short period of time and that there are entire courses devoted to this subject, but I think more handouts and concrete direction would have been very beneficial. I, for one, forget much about what we learned about web sites, simply because Thom went so fast in explaining it, and we didn't spend a whole lot of time on it.

As far as the campaigns go, we found that much of what we did with Dormland Security was successful. Video turned out to be a very important medium for us, and worked very well. We also found that by incorporating other campaigns in our video, we could create a web connecting all the campaigns and therefore promote all of them by promoting one. Regarding our video, we initially planned to make it comedic in the slap-stick, Saturday Night Live type of style. We found though, that this might be over-the-top and less funny than if we made the humor more subtle. We also learned about the importance of lighting and properly-placed cue cards while filming. We initially planned on having a person or persons as our logo, or mascot, for Dormland Security. We played around with the idea of making a superhero team who protected dorm rooms from theft. However we found that this superhero idea created too much juxtaposition with the news video theme. Therefore we decided on a more subtle, plainer logo of black and white lettering.

Thom's Evaluation

I think that Citizen Media was a very interesting class. I haven't ever taken a class like it and I think that I learned a lot about things I generally don't know about ie. Computers/websites. I think that Thom knows a lot of "stuff" that most people have no idea about. I was really interested in his stories about going to Indonesia and all of the people he has met and known. He is very cultured and knowledgable about crazy pieces of information and I felt he did his best to introduce us to it. I know that it was the first time he taught a freshman honors class and thought he did a pretty good job considering nobody knew what to expect. I really enjoyed making the campaign, I think I picked up on things like iMovie quickly when before I would have had no idea how to do it. I thought that Thom could have slowed the pace down in making the websites from those, like myself, that had no idea what was going on. I did complete my own personal website though : ). Overall, I thought I learned a lot of scattered information throughout the course and I think if Thom taught it again, that it would go over more organzied, now that we know what to expect.

S104 with Thom

So this class started out a little daunting. I was a bit lost when we first started doing html. Then after i started understanding the html, i was really excited to keep learning about it. I would have loved to just keeping learning about html and creating websites, but we headed off to develop different campaigns. Which was really cool, too, but my job was to film, so i didn't really learn anything new, so it got a bit boring. Maybe if i were an editor or continued developing the websites, it would have been more beneficial to me. But I volunteered to get the camera training, there were plenty of editors, and we had a great website guy already. So it was still cool, but my job was just to point and click for most of the last part of the class. I'm really so much more interested in working with html, though, and (sad that i don't have a mac for all the cool programs that come with it) i'd really like to learn more.