LIS 7008 - Information Technologies
Spring 2014 - Section 01
Assignment 4

This homework is due on your course Web site before the beginning of next class session. Partial credit may be awarded.

For this week's assignment, we will integrate multiple media onto a single Web page. Along the way, we'll learn a bit about how to find this stuff. The assignment is to build a Web page with the following content:

  1. A lecture video from the Web. Some example videos are available from here and there. Your page must point directly to the video, not to a Web page which provides a clickable link to the video. If you have trouble accessing these videos, you can use other lecture videos on the Web. Do not download lecture videos and upload them to the class Web server, because it may violate the copyright law for doing so. It is nice but not required to embed the video in your Web page for this task.

  2. An audio greeting in your own voice. You need a computer microphone for recording your voice. The audio greeting should not play automatically; rather, it should be played when the user clicks the play button. In other words, try to embed an audio player into your Web page. You may record the greeting any way that you like, but Windows XP contains a sound recorder that is suitable for this task [Start->All Programs->Accessories->(Entertainment->)Sound Recorder]. You can find my sample audio file if you want to see how this comes out.

  3. A link to a tutorial that explains how JPEG or MP3 really works. The trick here is to find a tutorial that provides a useful degree of insight without getting lost in math. Your goal should be to find an explanation that you think you and your classmates would really find useful. The tutorial does not need to be a video.

  4. A cartoon that contains a donkey found using Google Image Search (http://www.google.com, select "Images"). Your page must include the cartoon as an inline image, not just as a clickable link to the image.

  5. A video lecture on Mars exploration that you can find using any Web search engine. NASA provides an example here (Note: you do not have to use this example). Your link should go directly to the video rather than just the search engine. For this task, you need to either embed the video in your Webpage or make a link to a webpage that allows to play the video directly.
Save your Web page for this homework as hw4.html (or any filename you like), then create another Web page named as 7008.html, which has the following content:

John Smith's LIS 7008 Homework (suppose you are John Smith):

Add a link from "Homework 4" to your hw4.html. Your 7008.html page must be accessible from this URL:
http://classes.slis.lsu.edu/wu/7008/sp14/your_folder/7008.html (where "your_folder" is is your first initial followed by your last name, all in lower case, such as jsmith for John Smith). Note that you must use the standard filename "7008.html".

If you like, you can also add a link from Homework 2 and Homework 3 to your earlier assignments. This will allow you to add access points to all of your homework assignments. Whether or not making a link from this 7008.html Web page to any of your earlier assignments is your choice, but I encourage you to do this so that you have a Web site with all of your 7008 assignments.

You do not need to send me your URL again, because I know your userid from the URL for your homework 2. If you have already had a 7008.html page named for any of your earlier assignments, please rename it as something else (such as 7008_hw1.html, 7008_hw2.html, 7008_hw3.html), so that when you FTP your new 7008.html file to your SLIS Web space your old 7008.html will not be replaced. Make sure I can access your hw4.html Web page by clicking the "Homework 4" link from your 7008.html page.

Warning again: Your Homework 4 must be accessible from http://classes.slis.lsu.edu/wu/7008/sp14/your_folder/7008.html (where "your_folder" is your first initial followed by your last name, all in lower case) by clicking the "Homework 4" link; otherwise, you will get 0 points because you will not be emailing me your URL again. This mimics your project client's requirements.

You may use any tools that you find useful (e.g., HTML editors, search engines) when designing these two Web pages, but I would like to encourage you to hand-code them. Here is a tutorial about embedding multimedia into your html page. You can also search this topic on the Web to get more tutorials, such as How To Embed Sound on a Web Page. Note that not all audio formats are supported by all browsers. Please check the HTML5 Audio webpage for the audio formats and their supported browsers.

Common problems reported by current and/or previous students:

Grading Rubric:

Yejun Wu (acknowledgment to Doug Oard)