Category: web-education

Kudos to Christian Montoya

Christian Montoya has a series of articles about teaching web design using standards. Here’s a quote from his latest post: Teaching Web Standards | Christian Montoya: “. . . we simply presented the tools and techniques to the students, and showed them what they would be capable of doing. It wasn’t about doing things the ethical way, but doing them the best way. Many students were learning Web design for the first time. They had the privilege of learning the modern way to build websites from the start. By now, we have a class full of students who know, and to varying degrees understand, technologies that many seasoned web designers still have trouble learning. I think this is something to be proud of. The most important thing is that students have learned all of this simply by doing.”

The series begins here and contains several interesting posts so far.

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New Perspective on Tech in Education

Intellagirl at Second Life Educational Research talks about New Perspective on Tech in Education or High School Smells Funny. Lack of resources is a problem in education. Lack of training is a problem in tech education. But Intellagirl found even more to worry about when she went into a public high school to do some tech training with the English teachers. Her story is interesting, and, I hope, will be ongoing as the training proceeds.

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Eric Meyer and lynda.com team up

The long awaited collaboration between Eric Meyer’s CSS expertise and Lynda Weinmann’s training movies on CD ROM expertise has just published. CSS Site Design is a set of CDs priced at $149.95, which might make you faint if you were thinking book prices, but is pretty standard for CDs. I haven’t seen this yet so I can’t give you a review. I expect a lot from this pair—good CSS and good presentation—and hope to have a chance to review it in-depth at some point.

What, When, Who: Internet History Timeline

Mike Cherim has put together a very useful and interesting timeline at Beast-Blog.com | Mike Cherim’s What, When, Who: Internet History Timeline that anyone trying to describe or explain the history of the WWW is going to love. Great stuff!

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The Changing Face of University Websites

A new article at PebbleRoad: The Changing Face of University Websites looks at changes in university sites regarding web standards, information architecture, homepages and RSS, and branding. Pebble Road is run by Maish Nichani, also the editor of elearningpost.

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What’s the problem?

I mentioned a few weeks back that I’m writing a new book. A feature of each chapter is a real world example that demonstrates some aspect of the chapter using valid HTML, valid CSS, and accessible design. In other works, a standards-based site.

I search for the real world examples using the sites that purport to catalog good CSS design examples, but when you run the basic validation tools on these examples, they don’t measure up. If you want a truly good standards-based design you have to go to a designer’s site, not to a regular, run-of-the-mill commercial site that would be visited by normal people who are not web designers. What’s holding back the everyday working business sites? Is it too hard, too steep a learning curve, too much browser incompatibility? After all these years, shouldn’t more average Jane or average Joe web production people be capable of using standards? Surely it isn’t only the 0.01% of the population who are standardistas who attempt to do good work with standards-based design.

Make my day. Tell me about a good example. I’d love to be proven a liar about the lack of good examples.

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