Dreamweaver, Drupal, and Teaching Students How to Build Websites

There has been a bit of a buzz going around the Internet the last few days or so about Amy Gahran's post on Dreamweaver being taught to students at an unnamed J-School. Her stance, and she's been backed up by joshb and Ken Rickard, is that Dreamweaver is a poor tool to teach journalism students in their online journalism classes and that teaching students how to use content management systems like Wordpress or Drupal would be better.

I sent the article to my friend and fellow professor, Dr. Ed Lamoureux, and we had an interesting discussion on the topic. At Bradley, I teach MM 113 - Introduction to Multimedia. The class is for all freshman Art and Multimedia students at Bradley (and a shorter version, COM 112 is taught to Communications students). Among other assignments, all of the students have to produce websites in this class and we use Dreamweaver as our primary tool. Later on in the Multimedia Program curriculum students are taught more advanced web authoring (including Wordpress and Drupal) by Steven Merrill. An interesting note from the conversation with Dr. Lamoureux was actually a correction of my own misconception: "J-School" isn't just graduate level students, but also undergraduate students.

Freshmen undergraduates sometimes hardly grasp how to use a computer, let alone know how to write clean HTML. Asking a freshman to secure a MySQL database, transfer a tar file via FTP to a remote server, log in via SSH to untar and set permissions, install a theme and do basic site configuration in Wordpress or Drupal is just completely beyond their skill level. Yes, the installers for Wordpress and Drupal have become amazingly simple to use, but they still assume at least a basic understanding of how the web works, if not also an understanding of how database-driven websites function.

I think that it's too simple to say that Dreamweaver is bad and Drupal or Wordpress should be taught instead. I also don't think Dreamweaver is the cure-all, and students still struggle with understanding how to use Dreamweaver.

Journalists, except in the case of bloggers, are not responsible for running and managing a CMS. Newspapers and other publications employ huge IT staff and specifically trained Web Editors to run the website. That means journalists don't need to know about comment moderation, or management of search terms. In many cases the journalists don't even have to write in HTML; conversion is handled by newspaper's computer systems or the web editor.

Then what should be the point of an online journalism class? Students should be taught how to understand and produce HTML and become familiar with the state of online media and especially the blog scene. Content management systems don't teach HTML, Dreamweaver *can*, if taught properly. A firm understanding of basic HTML will allow a budding journalist to then be able to more easily grasp the concepts of content management. If the students understand how difficult it would be to maintain a static website, they'll appreciate the power and management possibilities of a content management system when they reach higher courses.

While I would prefer to start my students in Notepad, writing HTML by hand with a pocket HTML reference in hand, this task is time prohibitive. Not to mention that type of learning is very much self-driven. Dreamweaver gives my students a chance to create basic websites visually and see the code (I have all of them use the "Split" view when working in class) created as they do. This sort of exercise teaches them how to understand HTML's structure and learn the syntax. Students leaving my class at the end of the semester aren't ready to go develop a huge website on their own, but a good number of them have grasped the basic concepts of web development and will be ready to learn the ins and outs of standards-based web design and eventually scripting, database development, and content management systems when they are older and more experienced.