Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Two new sources for higher ed curriculum teaching materials came to my attention today. First is MERLOT, a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education. This is a Canadian group with yearly conferences, peer review, and a large collection of materials.
The second is Connexions, which offers free scholarly materials.
Technorati Tags: education, web design education
This Wiki from the University of Waterloo aims to explore whether there is a need for education specific microformats and how microformats are being used in education: Main Page – Uwebd
Currently the Wiki is open to all.
Technorati Tags: web design, education, web design education, web standards
I saw an ad for this site, TeachersPayTeachers.com – Helping Creative Minds Come Together, at the bottom of my daily Wordsmith mail today and clicked on it immediately. This site launched on April 2006 as a spot where educators can buy and sell original course materials. As of this morning they show 231 products available, but nothing is yet listed in the computer science category. Judging from the categories under University Discipline that is the most likely category for topics of interest to readers here, unless they intend to add more refined categories as they receive materials to sell.
I, for one, will keep an eye on this site and hope that promising materials that will help teachers with course work that teaches web design using standards and best practices begins to appear.
Technorati Tags: web design, accessibility, CSS, education, web design education, web standards
A conclusion I draw from On Quality Education – The Web Standards Project is that students, college administrators, college instructors, and business people hiring web development personnel need to work together to promote change toward instruction in best practices and web standards.
The horror stories about college instructors still teaching table-based layout, frames, and nothing about CSS are too common. Students need to insist on better instruction and let their institutions know about it. Instructors need to insist on training and let their administrators know about it. Hiring managers need to require knowledge of standards and accessibility from all new employees.
I have a wealth of experience in teacher training and teacher workshops. If you want help leading your university staff to better instruction in CSS, web standards, accessibility and best practices, I’d be very happy to help you achieve that goal.
Technorati Tags: web design, accessibility, CSS, education, web design education, web standards
A few days ago I commented that I was going to be using Moodle. Unfortunately that project got changed to a PHP BB instead of Moodle. I’m disappointed I didn’t get to have the full experience with Moodle.
Moodle is a course management system designed to help educators who want to create quality online courses. The software is used all over the world by universities, schools, companies and independent teachers. Moodle is open source and completely free to use.
I didn’t see how easy or hard it was to upload material, create links, or do other tasks beyond what I already mentioned. However, I did have time to notice that it was much faster and more user friendly than Blackboard. There was none of the irritating and redundant clunkiness that makes using Blackboard so tedious. I also don’t know if Moodle has all the features that Blackboard has, including the ones I especially liked such as the grade book.
Have you had any experience with Moodle? I’d like to know what you think.
Technorati Tags: education
I signed up to work with a project using the course management system Moodle today. My initial impression is favorable, but I haven’t gotten into much yet. It works with Safari, always an indicator to me that the developers are meeting web standards. Getting signed up was easy, updating my profile was easy, and making an initial post in forums was easy. I’m anxious to see how it handles assignments and homework. More on Moodle as I progress through the project.
Technorati Tags: education
WebAIM has a survey of Web Accessibility Policies (and Pseudo Policies) in Postsecondary Institutions: “The list of policies on this page is not all inclusive, but represents a broad
sampling of policies across the United States and other regions around the
world. Many of these policies can be more accurately described as suggestions
than policies, since many institutions do not have any binding formal policy.”
Technorati Tags: web design, accessibility