Category: InterAct

Now Available! InterACT with Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design

InterACT with Web Standards coverInterACT with Web Standards: a Holistic Approach to Web Design is available today.

This announcement is a BIG DEAL.

This book puts everything you need to teach a class in web design or development with web standards into your hands. The book is easy to use in connection with InterACT’s 17 courses in 6 learning tracks making it the perfect tool and resource for teaching or learning contemporary web design best practices.

If you are a student who wants to learn about building a web site with web standards, this book will lead you there.

For educators, your semester will be a snap to plan with this book. It’s all right there for you.

The book is published by New Riders (2010). There are 10 authors. The major contributor being Chris Mills, with additional expertise from Erin Anderson, Virginia DeBolt, Derek Featherstone, Lars Gunther, Denise Jacobs, Leslie-Jensen-Inman, Christopher Schmitt, Glenda Sims and Aarron Walter. I’m really proud to have been a small part of making the book a reality, because I think the book is going to be very important to students and teachers who are looking for the a reliable resource for web design best practices.

In addition to the writers, a number of other people worked to bring this book to life. They include Aarron Walter as project manager, Patrick Lauke as technical editor, Jeff Riley as development editor, Leslie Jensen-Inman as creative director and Jessi Taylor as book and site designer.

Many kudos go to Leslie Jensen-Inman and Jessi Taylor. When you see this book and hold it in your hands you will realize what a work of art it is from a design and typography point of view. It’s a beautiful book.

Take a look at the table of contents:

  1. InterACT
  2. Tools
  3. Learning on the Web
  4. Internet Fundamentals
  5. Writing for the Web
  6. Information Architecture Intro
  7. Site Planning
  8. Content Analysis
  9. Content Strategy
  10. HTML Intro
  11. CSS Intro
  12. <head>
  13. Headings and Paragraphs
  14. Whitespace
  15. Links
  16. Images
  17. Lists
  18. Tables
  19. Forms
  20. Floats
  21. Positioning
  22. Accessibility Intro
  23. Accessibility Helps
  24. Accessibility Testing
  25. Bringing it All Together
  26. Index

The InterACT with Web Standards book site has everything you need to know. There, you’ll find links to purchase the book, links to code examples from the book, links to bonus content, and links to the sample project. The site has links to information about InterACT, OWEA, and the Web Standards Project. You can take a peek inside the book, read some reviews, grab links to all the resources cited in the book, and MUCH MORE.

Buy now and take advantage of this limited time offer tweeted by @waspinteract.

InterACT With Web Standards, the first book from The Web Standards Project, is out. Save 35% on it with code INTERACT. http://cot.ag/9RS4rEMon May 17 16:00:20 via CoTweetWaSP InterAct
waspinteract

Yes, you can! Teach web standards with InterACT

What do educators find in the InterACT courses? Competencies. Assignments. Resources.

WaSP InterACTYou’ll find assignments with rubrics related to each competency. Some courses also include learning modules that can be used either online or in the classroom.

Most courses include book, article, and/or web site recommendations that you may find useful either as required or supplemental resources.

Here are the currently available courses. More are in progress.

If you want to contribute assignments or courses, here’s how to contribute.

The first book from the InterACT team, InterACT with Web Standards, will be on bookstore shelves May 15.

Useful links: liquid layouts, new InterACT courses, InterACT contributors,

Have you discovered zomigi’s blog? There are wonderful things there, like this collection of 70+ essential resources for liquid and elastic layouts.

Six new courses added to the WaSP InterACT curriculum. They are:

As is true of all InterACT courses, these six new courses contain competencies (the stuff students need to master in order to pass the class), assignments with grading rubrics, exam questions, recommended texts and readings, and technologies required to teach the course.

Aarron Walter (@aarron) made a Twitter list of  all the contributors to the InterACT project. Follow @aarron/InterACT.

Useful Links: Captions, your college on Facebook, Web Education Rocks at SXSW

The Future will be Captioned at the YouTube blog explains their new auto-captioning function, which works only for English videos at this point.

I saw a presentation from the social media team at Central New Mexico Community College last week. They talked about how they interact with the college’s 25,000 students on Facebook. The rule they gave for social media interaction was 80% fun and 20% serious. They are getting good results with what they are doing. If your college is not having much luck getting into social media, take a look at the way CNM is doing things. It’s an instructive model.

sxsw interactiveWill you be at SXSW Interactive? I hope you’ll attend the Web Education Rocks: 2010 WaSP InterAct Annual Meeting. In the past, this session was billed as the WaSP annual meeting, but this year most of the things going on within WaSP relate to InterAct–both the web standards curriculum and the web standards book. You’ll find out what the new courses are that have been added to the curriculum, and more about the book that will come out soon. Hope to see you there.

InterAct scores a big w00t with new book and site

InterAct with Web Standards coverInterACT with Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design has reached the stage in the publishing cycle where you can preorder the book.

You can order on Amazon.com or from Amazon.co.uk. At some point in the near future, it will also be available from Peachpit and other booksellers like Barnes and Nobel.

A new site at interactwithwebstandards.com went up yesterday in support of the book. Currently there, you’ll find the table of contents, and a list of all the people involved in writing and designing this book. The list contains some familiar names and excellent people at work on this book.

It’s the first “companion” book written in support of the InterAct Curriculum.

Speaking of the InterAct Curriculum, even more course materials and more courses are going to be announced at SXSW in March, so be watching to see what the new courses are.

Here’s a blurb from the site, explaining what the book is all about.

Crafted by the education luminaries that brought you the revolutionary InterACT curriculum, the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, and the experts that power The Web Standards Project, this book is the definitive guide to the best practices every web professional needs to master to succeed in their career.

If you’re teaching a basic web design course, you should check out the resources available in this book as well as in the curriculum, which has materials for many more courses as well.

Web Education Rocks

web education rocks

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!

W3C Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group: The Big Reveal

Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group (OWEA) was announced this week by the W3C.

The mission of the Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group, part of the Incubator Activity, is to help enhance and standardize the architecture of the World Wide Web by facilitating the highest quality standards and best practice based education for future generations of Web professionals through such activities as

  • fostering open communication channels for knowledge transfer
  • curriculum sharing between corporate entities, educational institutions, Web professionals, and students.

W3C Advisory Committee Representatives may join this XG on behalf of their organizations. Participants are automatically subscribed to the Member list when they join the group. Participants should also subscribe to the public list. Non-Participants may also subscribe.

The goal of this Incubator Group is to bring together interested individuals, companies, and organizations with a strong interest in the field of educating Web professionals, to explore the needs and issues around the topic of Web development education. This Incubator Group will detail the options for establishing a group dedicated to bringing Web standards and best practices to the process of educating future professionals in Web professions, no matter where this training and education might be provided, and will define the goals, activities, and a clear mission for such an organization, and will seek to establish this organization’s viability and role.

This Incubator Group has been initiated by various independent projects and organizations such as the Opera Developer Community, Yahoo! Developer Network/Juku, Web Directions, Web Standards Project (WaSP) InterAct Curriculum, World Organization of Webmasters (WOW), and other groups, as a united forum within which to pursue their shared goals of improved Web development education.

John Allsopp is the initial chair of the group.

W3C initiating members are