There are so many new disciplines web professionals need to be know about, if not specizlized in, that weren’t around ten or even five years ago.
It’s not always easy to keep on the latest and greatest in web and mobile tips, tricks and techniques.
Sometimes it’s downright difficult.
If it’s hard to keep up with the changes as professionals, so it must be even more so for our teachers of the craft.
For the past several years, a group of dedicated and talented volunteers have been working to help fix that.
Our Education Task Force has developed a world-class curriculum – we’re talking about tools for teaching.
Materials such as syllabii, quiz questions, recommended readings, and more aid in creating web professionals that are ready for the job market that so desperately needs young, competent web builders.
With such a strident resource, professors, educators to teach standards-based web design and development in their own classrooms.
Available on our web site, Web Standards Project InterACT Curriculum have found their way into some forward-thinking classrooms all over the world.
And it’s totally free.
In addition, the Education Task Force published a textbook based off the curriculum titled InterACT with Web Standards.
This web standards textbook is a available from Peachpit, which has published classics such as Jeffrey Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte’s Designing with Web Standards and Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag’s The Zen of CSS Design.
Today, I’m happy to announce that the curriculum reaches even more people than ever before.
The InterACT Curriculum developed through Web Standards Educational Task Force has been licensed to W3C.
Through their resources and network, the curriculum will be used to teach companies and organizations, large and super-large, about standards-based education.
And it only seems appropriate that InterACT finds yet another home that is the W3C.
The Educational Task Force’s InterACT was one of the primary catalytics that led to the formation of the Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA) under the W3C.
To continue to expand the curriculum, the Education Task Force needs your help.
You don’t need to be a self-proclaimed web guru or a mobile ninja to help.
We people that specialize in all facets of web and mobile design and development that includes copywriters, content strategists, user experts, project managers, and more.
There’s room for everyone and, frankly, it has been and will continue to be people like yourself reading this message right now that will make world-caliber educational material.
Contribute to a curriculum that gets in the hands of tomorrow’s builders today.
Fill out the contribution form or reach out to EduTF leaders, Glenda Sims and Mark DuBois to ask how you can get more involved.
]]>From my seat on the sidelines of the book project I found it to be one of those rare gem that provides insight from a variety of working professionals on the topics they know best — from content creation to markup to accessibility — all along the way teaching the fundamentals and craft that goes into building successful web sites. While the middle third of the book covers page building with HTML and CSS it is surrounded by discussion of topics from strategy to marketing to accessibility to something so many technical books leave off — how to use the web to keep learning about the web as it evolves.
That is the core of why I’m loving seeing the work the authors have done with this book and with the WaSP InterACT Curriculum. Education, be it in higher education settings, professional and business settings or those self educating, in our fast moving and always changing field has to cover these fundamentals and core principles as much as it is about current coding techniques or the current crop of browsers or devices. The authors, many of whom have been in the business for a decade or more, have built up knowledge of these fundamentals and work hard to pass them onto the reader.
Information about InterAct with Web Standards and its authors is available on the book’s companion website. It is worth noting that 25% of author proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to the Open Web Education Alliance.
This Friday, June 11, many of the authors are participating in an online book launch event and conference. Though it is sold out, if you sign up for the waiting list you’ll be informed when tapings if the event are available.
Finally, you can read up on and support the curriculum initiatives at the WaSP InterACT Curriculum, support the Open Web Education Alliance win a grant with your vote on Drumbeat, or check out the Opera Web Standards Curriculum.
]]>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.
Though we’ve spent hundreds of hours developing these courses, we know the hardest work is still ahead. We need your help to get these courses into high schools, and colleges around the world. If you are an educator, use these courses (they are free and licensed under Creative Commons). If you are a student, tell your teachers about InterACT (gold star for you!). If you are an industry pro, connect with a local school to let them know about InterACT, or better yet, give a short presentation on web standards in the real world. Regardless of your connection to web education, you can help move the cause forward with a tweet, a blog post, or a conversation with a colleague.
These six courses are just a piece of what InterACT is working on. Stay tuned.
]]>I was priveleged to see a glimpse of this in action at Web Directions North and saw the Shared Passion that was demonstrated by everyone there, and this initiative is nothing less than thrilling. We at WaSP hope that you’re as excited about this as we are.
Please join me in openly congratulating our team members of the WaSP Education Task Force that were so instrumental in planning and executing this unmatched resource: Aarron Walter, Steph Troeth, Leslie Jensen-Inman. There are many more contributors to this project, but without these three, this simply wouldn’t have happened. The three of you are inspirational to us all and give us a taste of what can be accomplished.
It doesn’t end there, though. The web evolves. Web Standards evolve. And so will this resource. If you have a passion for education and making a difference, we’d love to have you involved.
]]>This was the feeling in Denver at the education-focus day “Ed Directions North” (held in conjunction with Web Directions North). The day included teachers from high schools, from colleges and universities and from industry. The premise was simple: bring together educators, web professionals and industry representatives to create a kind of think tank on improving the quality of education for the next generation of web professionals.
I say “we” but really I mean to say that there were a few key people that were involved in putting this together:
The tireless work of these people, especially Steph, Aarron and Chris with the hands-on work, and John for his support of the concept and the event combined with the work of Leslie Jensen-Inman and Bill Cullifer for their “Web Professional Education Summit” made for an excellent event with a focus on education like we haven’t seen before.
I was asked to share my expertise in accessibility (and teaching accessibility), others were there to share other specialties: Dave Shea, Mike ™ Smith, and Christian Heilmann (though I ended up delivering Christian’s slides on JavaScript as he got stuck in London with flight delays)
The bottom line? This was one of the most exciting events I’ve participated in. It was more than just a pre-conference. It was a group of people with a shared passion for education. It was enough to give me goosebumps, and others tell me they got an incredible buzz from it as well. This sounds incredibly corny to write, but on that day, we came away feeling like we really could make the world a better place. We had new friends, allies and conviction to improve the curriculum and teaching and learning materials for tomorrow’s web designers and developers.
This passion is what you’ll see when you come see the WaSP panel at SXSW and learn of the work that we’re doing on the education front. This passion is what you’ll see as we create our direction forward as the Web Standards Project. This passion is what you’ll see as WaSP implements a vision of improving and continuing education about web standards and accessibility best practices. I hope you share the passion that we do.
]]>In order to help educational institutions to identify and include material for these competencies, we are creating a set of foundation courses that can be readily adapted into an existing program at a college, school or university.
The framework will include a collection of tools:
Why is it called a framework? Given the velocity at which Web technology unravels, we recognize that required skill sets can change rapidly, and that the best way to keep this material useful is for the education community to enrich it with their expertise and experiences. In this way, the WaSP Curriculum Framework will be a “living curriculum” that we hope would be a knowledge base of required skills.
The framework will include guidelines to help educators around the world develop assignments and learning modules that address issues specific to their classrooms. These independently developed teaching materials can then be submitted back to the WaSP Curriculum Framework for review and potential inclusion in the project.
We are also actively working on connecting with other organizations and institutions to create as comprehensive a curriculum framework as possible.
We encourage everyone to get involved by contributing content to the framework upon its initial release in March 2009. In the meantime, join the WaSP Edu Facebook group to share your insights and participate in the discussion. Of course, there is always the WaSP EduTF public discussion list if Facebook isn’t your thing.
]]>The survey was launched in the second quarter of 2007 and educators in both secondary and higher education were targeted. The survey ran for approximately three months. After many starts, stops, and delays (which included the recruitment of Industry and Educational Professionals to the Task Force), the results of the survey are available.
When Educational Professionals were asked what their biggest challenges to implementing a curriculum for best practices, including accessibility and Web standards, they indicated the lack of appropriate materials and reference materials. With both the Opera Web Standards Curriculum and the Web Standards Project Curriculum Framework in active development, this should no longer be an issue.
Later this year, the Education Task Force plans to run another iteration of the survey. We hope to have multiple translations of the survey at that time. If you are interested in translating the survey into another language, please contact the Education Task Force.
]]>Chris states:
We think it will be useful to anyone who wants to learn or teach client-side web design/development “the right way”, including students and teachers at schools or universities, trainers and employees inside companies, etc. It already has support from several universities and large companies, including Yahoo!
Translations and packaging of the curriculum as PDFs is on the to-do list.
]]>The WaSP Education Task Force was created in 2005 to work directly with institutions of higher education to help raise awareness of Web standards and accessibility among instructors, administrators, and Web development teams.
Our mission is not a small one. Our work and message needs to reach beyond our reading audience and the Web standards community in order to get information, help, and resources to more people. EduTF is discussing and looking at a variety of ways in which we can help.
To help with our mission, EduTF has added new members, including: Aarron Walter, Gareth Rushgrove, Lars Gunther, Jeffrey Brown, Kathy Keller, Christopher Schmitt, and Virginia DeBolt. Each member has experience with education and a strong passion for improving education in the area of Web standards and technologies.
One task the EduTF has been working on is the publication of the EduTF Survey results. We are reviewing the final draft of the publication and hope to share this information very soon.
The survey results have been very helpful in highlighting key needs, challenges and issues within the educational community and these will be addressed by the EduTF and also through our Curriculum Project.
The Curriculum Project will be a resource that could be used by those in education, as well as, anyone needing to update knowledge on Web related technologies.
Aarron Walter is leading our Curriculum Project and has this informative report to share:
]]>The quality of Web design and development education in our schools is perhaps the most significant barrier preventing the world-wide adoption of Web standards. The EduTF has been hard at work this year developing a curriculum to address this issue. Our goal is to create a curriculum that is modular allowing courses to be selectively integrated into existing programs that need updating, or adopted entirely to serve as the foundation for new Web design and development programs in colleges, universities, and high schools around the world.
This is a big project. We’ve sought guidance from talented educators already teaching standards, and top industry professionals who have helped us identify the tools and topics each course should include. The EduTF is teaming up with Chris Mills of Opera who is leading an initiative to create a broad series of detailed articles that teach basic principles of front end development. These articles will be integrated into a number of courses to provide educators and students with practical references and a solid foundation in Web standards.
The curriculum will be released in stages, the first of which will include a core set of courses that address foundation topics such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, information architecture, usability, and the history of the Web. In subsequent releases, courses will be added that address more advanced topics, and specific tools popular in the industry.
Each course will contain a collection of tools for educators including:
- A course overview
- Recommended course dependencies indicating what students will need to know before beginning each course
- Learning competencies describing what students must master in order to receive a passing grade
- Assignment recommendations and test questions that allow educators to measure a student’s mastery of each competency
- Recommended readings from Chris Mills’ article series on Web standards and other reputable sources
We hope to release the curriculum in March of 2009 in an online format that will make it easy for educators to access and contribute back to the project. We view it as a living system which will be greatly enhanced by community contributions.
It’s a very big undertaking, but one that we believe could make a significant impact not only on the quality of Web design and development education offered in our schools, but also on the adoption rate of Web standards. If you’re an educator with pedagogical materials or ideas to share, please join the mailing list and our IRC channel to become part of the conversation. We welcome your support and inputs as we proceed with the development of the WaSP Web standards curriculum.
From time to time, the Task Force has been contacted by educational professionals who are teaching Web standards and best practices in their programs.
The WaSP Education Task Force and W3C Quality Assurance Interest Group propose the creation of a curriculum framework to help educators teach best practices in Web design and development more effectively. Upon completing modules in such a curriculum, a student should have sound knowledge of best practices and a solid foundation upon which to build.
If you are an educator or have influence over curriculum, we would like your input with regard to this subject. We have created a short survey as a first step to accomplish this task. The survey is brief and includes nine questions.
If you have additional comments or questions, please email us at [email protected]
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