Ada Lovelace Dayis an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.

Take a visual tour through Glenda’s life, from her childhood in Texas to her current position as Senior Systems Analyst in Information Technology Services at the University of Texas at Austin.

Her blog is Oz: the blog of glenda sims (the goodwitch) and she’s @goodwitch on Twitter. The rest of her information is listed at Flavors/goodwitch.

Before we get into the professional activities that made her an Ada Lovelace topic, let Glenda tell you a bit about her personal life.

I’m happily married (20+ years) to the love of my life, Scott. We have two of the most wonderful children on the planet (both boys). I am a native Texan. Born in Houston. Bachelor’s Degrees in Psychology and Business Management from the University of Texas at Austin. Began my career as a human resources professional at UT Austin. Had an opportunity to become a programmer (for Human Resources) so I could automated the tasks that could be done by computers, allowing employees to use their brains for more useful tasks.

I love to read. I’m really into kid-lit and discovering new authors with my youngest son. Last year we had a blast reading almost all of the book son the Texas Blue Bonnet Reading List.

One of my favorite things to do as a kid was to making jumping origami frogs…and yes…I still love to make them.

At UT-Austin, Glenda works on Team Web and help supports the central web site for the University.  She is the self-appointed web standards and accessibility advocate at UT. Her work on campus includes museum technology, usability, accessibility and universal design. She’s currently leading the project to redesign UT’s mobile web site.

She works with Knowbility, an accessibility training and advocacy organization based in Austin, Texas. She’s been an accessibility consultant, judge and trainer with Knowbility since 2001. She said,

My dear friends at Knowbility are a huge part of who I am today.  Sharron Rush, John Slatin, Jim Thatcher, Jim Allan and the whole accessibility crew in Austin have filled me with the burning desire to make sure that the web is available to everyone, regardless of their disabilities. Knowbility is like family to me.

I know Glenda best through her work with Web Standards Project, the InterAct curriculum, and OWEA (Open Web Education Alliance)—all projects I’m involved with myself. She’s an influential and dynamic leader in these projects and is moving mountains to bring change to web education. I asked her how she got into this area.

My journey into Web Standards started in December 2000 when I asked if I could become the web accessibility expert for UT. I was quickly introduced to Dr. John Slatin, an international accessibility expert and faculty member on our campus. John and I were an incredible force on campus. We shared new techniques, brainstormed creative solutions, developed training classes, policies and guidelines for campus and ran accessibility competitions for our webmasters.  We weren’t merely satisfied with teaching the “how” of accessibility…we wanted to build a culture of universal design on campus and created accessibility evangelists. My years working with John were priceless.

John introduced me to Sharron Rush and Knowbility in early 2001. We become the 3 Accessibility Amigos.

In SXSWi 2005, I was preparing to speak on an accessibility panel with James Craig, Ian Lloyd and Derek Featherstone. As we worked on our game plan for the panel, I was introduced to a whole new crew of web and accessibility advocates from the Web Standards Project. As I sat and listened to the vision and plans of the WaSP members I felt deeply inspired to take my work to the next level. Up until 2005 I was focused on making things accessible here in Austin. After SXSW this year I realized that I wanted to act globally as well as locally. I set a personal and private goal for myself. I wanted to become a WaSP.

In 2006 I had an opportunity to volunteer to work on a project that Molly was kick-starting called the WaSP International Liaison Group (ILG). Steph Troeth and I were asked to co-lead this project. I had the honor to work for more than 2 years on this project with an incredible group of web professionals who spent countless volunteer hours spreading the message (and the techniques) for ensuring an open web.

Glenda delights in telling the story of how InterAct and the now-forming Open Web Education Alliance came into being at SXSW in Austin. Here’s how she describes it.

At SXSWi 2008 I met the energetic Aarron Walter at the Red Eye Fly. Aarron had this idea that what the web really needed was a web education curriculum framework. His vision to build this framework as a way for educators, industry professionals and students to build and sustain a living curriculum gave me goosebumps. Within 24 hours of my conversation with Aarron, I was approached by Chris Mills who was already working on a similar and complimentary project (the Opera Web Standards Curriculum). Then Leslie Jensen-Inman and I were having a conversation where she was focused on solving the challenges of teaching the web and preparing students for real-world expectations.

I shook my head and said…”this is the magic of SXSW”…and realized I had to get these three people together. The next round of conversations took place in the middle of a bowling alley (at Geeks Love Bowling) and continued throughout the conference. The result of these conversations (and the hard work of many dedicated individuals can be seen at interact.webstandards.org.

Every time I talk to these people, whether it is in person, Skype or email, I’m filled with energy and excitement of what we can accomplish when we pull together.

In early 2009, John Allsopp was hosting Web Directions North in Denver. John has heard about the InterAct Curriculum and brought many members of the InterAct team together to host a Ed Directions Day in Denver. The synergy that occurred in Denver was off the charts. What happens when you add equal parts of WaSP/InterAct members + Passionate Educators + Web Industry Visionaries + Brilliant W3C Minds? You get the magic we call the Open Web Education Alliance.

A completely different facet of Glenda’s personality is her love for art museums. She said,

I’m deeply and madly in love with art museums.  And there is nothing I enjoy more than making museums and their collections accessible. I have had the great honor of working on a number of projects with the Blanton Museum of Art. My favorite project was developing an interactive handheld tour (iTour) for a research project. The research question:  Does having access to rich multimedia (on a handheld device) enhance or detract from the experience of exploring a work of art inside a museum gallery. Our research paper is published. The iTour project lead to a string of exciting adventures with Anne Manning, Dan Updegrove and Eric Guaglione.

If you attended SXSW Interactive this year, I hope you ran into Glenda there. She was on a Web Education Rocks panel with the WaSP  team.  She says,

I have the great fortune of living in Austin where the amazing SXSW Interactive Conference occurs every year. What is SXSWi? It is like spring break for geeks…where geeks come to be with their own and dream beyond the edges of the horizon…and then…filled with some magically SXSW energy…actually turn those dreams into reality. SXSW is nothing short of magical.

She works to make the web accessible and she works to train the future professionals of the web. So, what does she look for in a web page?

There are two types of sites I love:  1)Super useful and usable sites  2)Immersive sites that make me think in an entirely new way.

One of my favorite “super useful” sites is Basecamp. If Basecamp were alive I would want to marry it.

One of my favorite “see things differently sites” is SFMoMA’s Art Scope.

I don’t think I look at websites like normal humans. I tend to turn websites inside, outside, upside down. I’m a big believer in the principles of creating a delightful user experience for the end user.

That is a fitting last comment from Glenda Sims. A big thank you to Glenda for her help and cooperation.

© vdebolt for Web Teacher, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | ]]> http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/03/24/meet-glenda-sims-on-ada-lovelace-day/feed/ 2 http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/01/12/learning-from-the-top-bloggers/ http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/01/12/learning-from-the-top-bloggers/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:59:48 +0000 vdebolt http://www.webteacher.ws/?p=3771

Oh, I know The Bloggess isn’t for everyone. She’s profane and outrageous. She’s offensive in so many ways. She’s also funnier than Robin Williams and extremely successful at blogging.

One of the hints you get when you read tips for being a better blogger is to summarize your posts in a weekly roundup. Another tip is to point out your most popular posts. I do remember to do those things every once in a while. I’m not very organized about it, but I remember once in a while.

The Bloggess writes in more than one place on the web (as I do). So she publishes a weekly summary of “shit-I-was-doing-when-I-wasn’t-here.” This feels like another edict from on high from a successful blogger: tell people about all the other stuff you’ve been doing.

In that spirit, my aim today is remind you off all the stuff-I-do-here-and-there-on-the-web.

• WaSP InterAct Curriculum. This is a web standards based curriculum produced by a worldwide volunteer group of experts from education, business, and many web related fields. It is freely available for use in education and business. Some courses are available now. More will be available in March. Several members of this group are working on a book.
• eHow. This how-to site is home to several hundred articles  of mine explaining all sorts of web related things in step by step fashion. I’m approaching a million page views at eHow, which is possibly a greater readership than I have anywhere else.
• First 50 Words. In a past life, I taught writing. I wrote some books about teaching writing. I embrace a technique called “writing practice” which calls for writing about any topic whatsoever. Most days of the week, I create a writing prompt for writing practice and post it at First 50 Words. I write about the topic and invite readers to write about it as well.
• BlogHer. I’m one of several Contributing Editors at BlogHer who write about technology and the Internet. I haven’t counted the number of posts I have at BlogHer, but I’m sure the number is in the hundreds now. For purposes of comparison, I’ve posted about 1000 writing prompts at First 50 Words and have over 1300 posts here at Web Teacher.
• TGB Elder Geek. TGB is Time Goes By. It’s a blog about what it’s really like to get older. There are so many elder bloggers who read Time Goes By that I was asked to write some geeky posts aimed at elders. Those posts aren’t much different from any other basic technical post I write.
• vdebolt.com. I mostly ignore my home domain. Recently I reworked it to reflect more of what I do now, and pared it down to about three pages of information. First time I’ve revised the material there in years. You can find a few more tidbits about me there, such as presentations I’ve done, books, and links to some stories.

There it is: stuff-I-do-here-and-there-on-the-web. With a tip of the hat to The Bloggess.

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© vdebolt for Web Teacher, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | ]]> http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/01/12/learning-from-the-top-bloggers/feed/ 2 http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/10/01/useful-links-owea-scrunchup/ http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/10/01/useful-links-owea-scrunchup/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:20:41 +0000 vdebolt http://www.webteacher.ws/?p=3234

Industry body forming to address IT graduate skills is an interview at Computerworld with OWEA co-chair John Allsopp.

The Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA), which is due to be launched early 2010, will be dedicated to promoting the best ways in which Web professionals and IT graduates can gear themselves up for the workforce.

OWEA co-chair John Allsopp, said there is concern among people in the industry around the world that educational institutions are not addressing all the relevant skills potential Web designers, Web developers and other Web professionals need.

“Even if they study things that are relevant to their role in the industry, what they’ve learnt is very little to do with the reality of the Web,” Allsopp said. “Most of the very experienced Web practitioners, no matter what their background, are largely self-taught because the industry is so rapidly evolving.”

The first issue of Scrunchup is out. Scrunchup is web magazine for young designers and developers. The founders are Anna Debenham and Paul Randall. Their purpose:

We made Scrunchup because we were fed up with the lack of decent advice out there for students wanting a career in web design or development. Most of the courses on offer are out of date, and don’t teach relevant skills, and many young people come out of courses without the required level of knowledge to get a good job.

Sure, there are lots of websites out there that give advice on writing really good code, but not many of them are aimed at young people who are just starting out. We also want to foster a community, and create a friendly atmosphere for young people to ask questions without feeling intimidated.

The initial issue of Scrunchup contains an interview with high school web design instructor Zac Gordon, an intro to web standards by Chris Mills, a piece on employment by Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington, and a story about the path to success by Anna Debenham.

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© vdebolt for Web Teacher, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | ]]> http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/10/01/useful-links-owea-scrunchup/feed/ 0 http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/09/28/american-innovation/ http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/09/28/american-innovation/#comments Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:18:36 +0000 vdebolt http://www.webteacher.ws/?p=3206

The President of the United States released a whitepaper called A Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs (PDF). The plan has three parts. At the base you see a section called building blocks which includes a statement about 21st Century education.

The paragraph describing the education building block is:

Educate the next generation with 21st century knowledge and skills while creating a world-class workforce. President Obama has proposed initiatives to dramatically improve teaching and learning in K-12 education, expand access to higher education and training, and promote student achievement and careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields.

Drill down into that Technology part of STEM, and think specifically about teaching web design, web development, and front end skills like HTML, CSS, JavaScript. What does it mean to promote student achievement and careers with 21st Century skills?

Related posts:

• W3C Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group: The Big Reveal
• Web Education Rocks
• How Educators Can Get the Most from WaSP InterAct

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© vdebolt for Web Teacher, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | ]]> http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/09/28/american-innovation/feed/ 2 http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/08/26/have-digital-tools-made-your-dreams-come-true/ http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/08/26/have-digital-tools-made-your-dreams-come-true/#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:36:43 +0000 vdebolt http://www.webteacher.ws/?p=3043

I found this wonderful video among PBS’s Digital Nation videos. Charlotte Ashurst McDaniel explains how digital tools have changed her life for the better.

I suspect that many of us have stories about how digital tools have changed our lives.

This blog changed my life. In the late 1990s and early in the current century, I was teaching basic HTML and web page creation with Dreamweaver in a community college. I couldn’t find a book I liked. In those years, now familiar concepts such as web standards, symantic HTML, using CSS to create the appearance of a web page, and accessibility were all under heated discussion. I became a believer early on—partly because of my frequent attendance at SXSW Interactive where I sat at the feet of people like Eric Meyer, Molly Holzschlag, and Jeffrey Zeldman while they talked about what they were doing.

Being a believer and trying to teach that way were almost incompatible in those days. The books at the time were still teaching table-based layouts, font-tag appearance controls and other not so wonderful techniques. I decided that I needed to go public with my complaints about the books that were available, and I started this blog. That was in about 2001.

The book reviews I post now are generally fairly positive. The wheel has turned. But for several years after  2001, they were very negative. I began to hear from publishers and writers. I was asked to look at tables of contents, to review chapters, to comment on proposed work. I was asked to write teacher’s editions. I did all those things and soon realized I’d made contacts within the world of computing book publishers.

I used those contacts to find out where to submit a proposal for a book of my own. I had this crazy idea that books should teach HTML and CSS at the same time. When a student learned a tag, they also learned  how to present it with CSS.  I truly did not want to make students learn a whole lot of useless HTML (like font tags) for the first half of a semester and then be told to forget all about it at the end of the semester when CSS was introduced. Learn both at once. I found a publisher–Sybex–who accepted the proposal. Sybex came up with the idea of calling it “Integrated” HTML and CSS.

I wrote the book from a teacher’s perspective. I’m not a computer science person—I’m not a programmer. I pulled together the best ideas for teaching I could and applied it to learning HTML and CSS.

So I had my own book, thanks to my blog. Publishers asked me to do more jobs: tech edit other people’s books. Write a second edition of my own book. Help other writers with their Dreamweaver books. Be the writer for a Dreamweaver book. In my own small way, I put the best web standards based material I can out into the world.

Then, a couple of years ago at SXSW, I met Aarron Walter. He talked about the notion that the Web Standards Project Education Task Force should get some volunteers together to work on a web standards based curriculum. I got involved in that. It seems to me now that this is where I was headed all the time. Because that involvement, that project, that group of people, may make a big difference in web education. The WaSP Edu Task force created a curriculum and called it InterAct. At this time, the first round of courses for the InterAct Curriculum are online. More courses are in development. The core group from InterAct have expanded to include business, education and schools in a  just-forming group at the W3C called The Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA). OWEA will bring industry and education together in pilot projects, education projects, outreach projects and in many other ways that will impact the education of web professionals in the future. One of those projects is the Web Education Rocks tours, which bring web standards professional educators to a location near you for training.

My blog changed my life. Dreams I didn’t even know I had are part of my life, part of many lives, part of the future of web education.

How has digital technology changed your life? I know you have a story. Please share it.

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© vdebolt for Web Teacher, 2009. | Permalink | 8 comments | ]]> http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/08/26/have-digital-tools-made-your-dreams-come-true/feed/ 8 http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/07/23/web-education-rocks/ http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/07/23/web-education-rocks/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:50:07 +0000 vdebolt http://www.webteacher.ws/?p=2908

Something significant for web education is happening in Chattanooga from August 5-8. The event is dubbed the Web Education Rocks Summit. The event is a meeting of the newly formed Open Web Education Alliance. Members are meeting to create a structure for OWEA that will aid companies, schools, and organizations involved in shaping the education of Web professionals.

On Thursday, August 6, there will be an open meeting for any interested web professional. This meeting is called The Tour, and is the first of many Tour dates for OWEA.  At this meeting, the speakers will be:

• John Allsopp, Web Directions
• Scott Fegette, Adobe
• Nick Fogler, Yahoo!
• Leslie Jensen-Inman, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
• Chris Mills, Opera
• Doug Schepers, W3C
• Aarron Walter, MailChimp

You can request a tour stop in your town. You may not get all of the speakers listed above at every Tour stop, but you will get some of the OWEA members. OWEA is an organization spun off from the drive to create the InterAct Curriculum.

The Web Education Rocks Summit was put together by Leslie Jensen-Inman from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who obtained all sorts of sponsorships and funds to support the efforts of OWEA. Leslie rocks!

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© vdebolt for Web Teacher, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | ]]> http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/07/23/web-education-rocks/feed/ 0 http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/06/29/useful-links-wasp-owea-announcement-html-5/ http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/06/29/useful-links-wasp-owea-announcement-html-5/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:26:33 +0000 vdebolt http://www.webteacher.ws/?p=2816

Introducing the Open Web Education Alliance at WaSP’s Buzz page. See also The Big Reveal for a link to the public mailing list for this group. Follow news on the group on Twitter @waspinteract.

html5doctor is a new group blog working to bring information about the proposed specs for HTML 5 to the masses. They encourage questions from readers about what it all means.

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