There are some wonderful politically related sites out there, from the League of Women Voters to online voting guides in various states. It opens up all sorts of aspects of learning that students would never encounter in a lecture room, listening to somebody talk and taking notes. Most faculty members would take the view that teaching students how to do this is not part of their job. Consequently, unless there are crazy people like us to take the initiative, this new pattern would never be established. Not only are Berman's and Wandesforde-Smith's students required to learn HTML, they're also required to learn it on their own time.
Students visit the on-campus computer labs for HTML classes in the late afternoons and evenings.
The classes are usually taught by students who have already completed Berman's course. Students in Berman's class are required to begin posting journal articles on the Web by the fifth week of the course. He even runs occasional contests to encourage students to design creative pages. I know that some of my classmates who suffered from computer phobia felt that it was intimidating and not what they expected to learn in a political-science class. However, technology is a fact of life.