Re: Andrew Cooper - Contributing

On 27 Sep 2011, at 18:04, Andrew Cooper wrote:

> Hi Chris,
> 
> 
> I'd like to contribute specifically to the Learning Material, Outreach, and Training and Certification projects.
> 

Thanks Andrew - I've added you to the relevant pages! 

> 
> I want to be able to provide my perspective as a student to the Learning Material project to ensure that paying students are taught everything they need to know about each subject whilst at the same time they aren't taught things that aren't necessary to the subject which consequently wastes the lecturers teaching time and the students learning time. 

This will be very valuable - as a student who has studied such courses, you'll have a lot of unique perspectives on what works and what doesn't in terms of learning experiences.

Maybe as a first task you could look at the shape of the current web standards curriculum (http://www.w3.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Curriculum) and let me know if you've got any feedback on it - what is working, what isn't, what things you think we need to add (yeah, we've got tonnes of things to add already!) and how the learning experience could be improved.

> 
> 
> In addition as a contributor to the Outreach project I'll be spreading the word about this Community Group to people I know in the industry (Alexander Dawson is an example so far), getting in contact with my former further education college tutors and communicating with my current higher education University lecturers about getting involved with the group as well as discussing how they would integrate the curriculum and training materials into their existing courses and discussing issues with assessment of external industry / vendor qualifications (currently discussing this with one of my lecturers at University where on a Computer Networking degree they deal with the CISCO certifications but there's an issue with internal University assessment regulations and the assessment of the actual qualifications themselves by CISCO, so this will be something to look in to with the Training and Certification project). I feel very strongly about getting passionate students involved with the development of this Community Group and its' projects but I don't know many personally, but I know that Anna has sent out a message to all Opera Campus Crew members about joining the group (I got the message as I was a crew member last year) so hopefully we'll see more students join in and contribute - It is after-all about providing a better Web education for future students.
> 

Sounds like you've got some great idea here for ways to progress. If you have ideas, feel free to add them to the relevant Wiki page: http://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/Outreach. We probably ought to keep a list of university/school/community contacts somewhere too, although we'd need to keep this somewhere password protected if it included people's contact details. Any ideas for a solution to this?

Doug, are we able to create password protected Wiki pages?

> 
> Lastly I'd like to be involved with the Training and Certification project because as a former (and still current) student that has had to endure both bad-practice (table-based Website design and development) and best-practice (CSS based) Web design / development lessons at further education and higher education level I want to help make sure that the trainers / educators are able to teach standards based Web design / development more effectively so that students don't leave the room thinking "This guy doesn't have a clue what he's talking about" and "I didn't understand a word he said, what on Earth was he going on about?". In addition I think a small army of students evangelizing W3C endorsed qualifications to educators will help push them to provide the qualifications.
> 

yup, definitely.

> 
> Apologies if that was over the top, I have a tendency to type more than what needs to be said. I once typed up a 13 page assignment that was only required to be 8 pages long (I still received the highest mark though!).

don't worry - I tend to be pretty concise on written word, but in person I am terrible for verbal diarrhoea ;-)