Category: web-education

A conversation with Stephanie Troeth

I discovered a very interesting woman in the course of getting ready for SXSW. My co-presenter for a SXSW Interactive panel, Stephanie Troeth, is that woman. Luckily, she agreed to an interview of sorts, since I thought you would like to know more about her, too.

Steph is a member of the Web Standards Project (WaSP), a grassroots organization working for the adoption of web standards. She’s a co-lead of the International Liason Group and serves on the Education Task Force at WaSP. Steph said she became interested in web standards because of an excellent mentor she had while in college. To Steph, web standards and usability just made sense. She calls them elegant. They save time, work, and create beautiful results.

Her involvement with WaSP began in 2003 when she was recruited to work by Molly Holzschlag after Molly saw some work she did for an outfit called MACCAWS. Steph’s personal website is unadorned.org, where she laments that everything is out of date. You can see a few examples of her poetry and other writing there, even though she is too busy working and traveling to promote web standards to keep it updated often.

Steph has a computer science degree. Her minor is in musical composition, and she performed on the keyboards from the age of 7 all the way through college. Although she is not composing music right now, she retains a strong interest in the arts, music and–get this–modern street art. As we strolled around the streets of downtown Austin today, she kept remarking on how square everything was. I must get her away from downtown so she can sample some of Austin’s very unsquare and famously weird ambience.

She was born in Borneo, is of mostly Chinese extraction, went to college in Australia, and now works in Montreal. You can see where her interest in using standards for the internationalization of web sites came from! Her day job at a Montreal company bills her as Director of Technology and Web Development. Part of that job is to hire people in the web development area, a job made more difficult because the college graduates she has to choose from are not often taught to use web standards as a best practice.

If you are at SXSW, come by on Sunday at 4:00 to see our talk on Best Practices in Teaching Web Design. Steph will also be participating in the WaSP panel on Monday at 5:00. Catch her in both places.

This is cross-posted at BlogHer.

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MySpace is the new Bud Uglly

Are you an old Internet hand? Old enough to remember laughing at Bud Uglly years ago? It was a spoof of all the horrible design mistakes made on web sites: the Onion of web design.

Bud Uglly is still around. I just found it. But we don’t need it so much these days to get a good laugh. Now we have MySpace. We have all the horrors of the bad old days: nested tables, unreadable color combinations, overwhelming backgrounds. And we have students coming into our classes who are pros at using MySpace and think it’s a top-notch way to communicate and a fun place to visit. They’ve made their own sites there and feel they’re creating web pages as a result. Well, they actually are creating web pages. The problem is the things they learned from the experience. The habits, the frame of reference, they have for what a web page is and how it’s put together. They may know some useful things you can build on, but they may have some ideas that need revamping. The challenges of teaching remain interesting.

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Case Studies in Training and Professional Development for Web Accessibility

Case Studies in Training and Professional Development for Web Accessibility | ATHEN: “Institutions of higher education who take Web accessibility seriously must create systems of training and professional development for their staffs and faculties. Case studies were gathered from 8 authors who are tasked to assist their institutions with Web accessibility.”

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My ebook’s days are numbered

I’ve been selling an ebook, A Beginner’s Guide: Writing CSS with Dreamweaver 8 for the last few months. This ebook is about to be retired from service. The reason is the upcoming release of my new book, Mastering Integrated HTML and CSS. The new book will be released on Feb. 27. It contains a chapter about using CSS in Dreamweaver 8. The chapter in the book covers basically the same material as the ebook, but the chapter does a better job with the topic. The chapter benefitted from being newly written and reorganized after learning from the initial experience of writing the ebook. And the chapter also benefitted from a couple of suggestions from the book’s technical editor, Zoe Gillenwater. She’s an expert Dreamweaver user herself and pointed out a couple of things that I hadn’t mentioned in the ebook that helped improve the DW8/CSS information in Mastering Integrated HTML and CSS.

The ebook was a help to me, because I used it to show my editors at Wiley that a chapter about using CSS in Dreamweaver 8 actually had a place in a book about hand-coding HTML and CSS. I hope it has been helpful to those of you who have purchased it for your own learning or to use in a classroom. (The license allows reproduction for classroom use.)

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Are teachers the final link in the chain?

I watched a fine interview with Molly at backstage.bbc.co.uk the other day, and it hit me that education and teacher training are the last link in the web standards chain. Well, okay, so Molly had a few things along this line to say. But not exactly what I’m about to say.

The technical people have all figured out that web standards work and make life easier. The corporate interests have all figured out that web standards bring a better return on investment and make good business sense. The accessibility advocates have all determined that web standards promote accessibility. The browser makers have all (finally, mostly) come into compliance with web standards. Everything is in place, everyone is convinced, but new sites are still being created using less-than-standards compliant code. Is education holding us back?

I’m going to generalize a bit now. It seems that all those busy, over-scheduled teachers in all the large and small colleges and universities around the country haven’t gotten the word yet. They haven’t had the training they need. They haven’t had time to figure out CSS for themselves. They don’t have the textbooks and resources they need. They are hamstrung by outdated requirements and antique regulations for technology education. And, as a result, they are not turning out students trained in standards, ready for industry jobs, who can produce sites based on best practices.

Of course, there are examples of colleges and universities where teachers are given the needed training, resources and opportunities to learn. When I find such examples, I’m quick to point to them here. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? There haven’t been many good examples to point to.

Teacher’s need to kick and scream to be sent to seminars, conferences, and classes; to have expert trainers brought to them; to hear what industry wants from their students. Yes, education is a bureaucracy, a slow-moving behemoth. But teachers can go to department heads and demand travel money to attended the right conferences, to have the right trainers, to plan a budget that will promote change.

I write books I think will help teachers teach standards. I review books to find the good ones that will help teachers teach standards. I can come to your college and help teachers learn about standards. If there is anything else that I can do for any college to make change happen, just let me know. I’ll be glad to do what I can.

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