O N S L O W   C O U R S E S

The purpose of this section of my site is to provide information for students who are taking, or have taken any of my Adult Education classes. Either the Introduction to the Internet course, the Basic HTML Writing course, or the Scanning and Editing Photos course.

If you live in the Wellington region of New Zealand you can take my Continuing Education courses, and many others besides, at Onslow College, Johnsonville. If not then you're out of luck.

Introduction to the Internet
This course is a four-hour session, usually on a weekend day, that aims to provide some basic knowledge of the internet, and particularly the World Wide Web. While four hours is not enough to cover more than a handful of topics, by the end of the course students should be able to use the web itself to answer any further questions they have. There is a Links Page to the Search Engines used in the course, and some other helpful sites.

Basic HTML Writing
This course is divided into two parts, each consisting of four 2-hour sessions. The first four sessions introduce the standard HTML tags, from simple text formating to links and images. By the end of the first part of the course students should be able to write simple, functional web pages from scratch, and have the ability to edit existing code.

The second section builds on what students have learned in the previous sessions. The focus is on putting pages on the web, and using more sophisticated layout techniques, such as tables. Topics such as cut-and-paste Javascript, photo-scanning and editing, and overall site design are covered. There is a Links Page for the course, with some student pages on show.

As you may have noticed, I'm a great beliver in simple web pages that use code universal enough to work on almost all browsers. I feel strongly that many web developers, who usually have the latest hardware and software, often forget that many users of the web are not using the latest version of MS Internet Explorer, or the latest Pentium processor. As a one-time Netscape and old Mac user I am only too aware of failures of many websites (some of which didn't even appear on my old browser). As as result I stress to my students the value of testing their pages in multiple platforms, and keeping it simple.

Scanning and Editing Photos
This is a short course that covers the basics of scanners and how to edit the images they produce. The notes, which are available online, are focused on the scanning portion of the course, whereas the editing is more of a hands-on component.