As a coda to my previous post, I sincerely regret that Dreamweaver is so expensive. Even though I strongly believe that learning the basics of HTML combined with a powerful web-authoring tool is very important if you are going to create work for the web, I also realize that there is little chance that a K-12 school district in the Ozarks is going to fund Adobe Creative Suite for a lab that is used for composition/language arts. Even if they did, and we have some districts that could have that kind of funding, students would be limited to doing all work at school, which would severely limit the scope of multimodal projects in particular. This is not just a problem for K-12 and it is not even solely a problem for students. For example, because I have a PC in my office and a Mac at home, I don’t even have the Adobe Creative Suite myself at home, even though I use the Creative Suite heavily for my editing work with Moon City Press and for Computers and Composition Online, not to mention any web-articles I may want to author. I have a web article to do this summer and will be going into the office to do it; perhaps that is for the best, but it does limit when I will work and I tend to work late into the night on creative projects or between 5-10 AM. I don’t see myself going into the office in the off hours. It echoes and the building is emptier in summer as it is. So, any 1:00 AM inspirations will have to be drawn on paper and kept for morning.
Lanette Cadle 