Writing a Book

While the rush to process students is somewhat quiet, I've started writing the manual for the course I'm due to teach in a few months. I'm really struggling - not with writing it as such, but with the fact that there is so much information, and I only have 18 hours of teaching to cover it in!

So far I've done an intro to what a webpage / site is, and an exercise to look at good and bad websites - and what makes them good or bad. I'm developing another exercise for later in the manual where students will create their own geocities web site, but will first need to build on their knowledge to get them there.

It's quite a challenge. I have no idea what level of knowledge I'll be dealing with, or how well the students will cope and understand. So I'm taking things from first principles, assuming no knowledge at all, and building on that.

Let's hope it works.....

I've got to keep this manual small enough to be affordable, but make it large enough to contain useful information. I don't want to over-burden the students financially or run out of time while trying to get through the manual. It's a pretty fine line to walk. Especially as one of my goals is that students will actually KNOW SOMETHING once they've completed this part of the course. They seem to come out of many others classes with a mind-blank!

But I'm off to a good start at least, with some direction. Just got to continue with it.