Education and WebCraft (was: Doing HTML the right way at W3C)

Hi, Sam-

I like your idea of relying more on the community to provide tutorials 
and other educational materials, and of rewarding quality materials and 
efforts with a link from our site; this benefits the authoring community 
and provides an incentive for people to not only create tutorial 
material, but to strive for quality.

The Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA) is just such a grass-roots, 
volunteer-driven effort which grew out of WaSP (among other efforts). 
They are currently operating partly as a W3C Incubator Group, and are 
even publishing a book.  They have compiled a fantastic set of 
educational materials aimed not just at self-taught developers, but at 
educators as well [1].  Here are some of the benefits I see from having 
this as a W3C activity:
* solicit educational requirements from employers
* peer-reviewed quality control
* accountable process
* outreach to educational institutions and certification programs
* feedback from teachers in the field
* compiling and propagating best practices, which strengthens the use of 
W3C standards and benefits our members

That said, sometimes the institutional approach doesn't reach the right 
audience, and moves too slowly.  For that, the efforts of talented 
individuals making tutorials and audience-targeted info pages is better, 
and it helps those creators' efforts to get noticed (which is not a bad 
thing).  Plus, it takes minimal effort from W3C to link to them.  But I 
think it's worth calling out the fact that these tutorial sites tend to 
favor the flashy, cool aspects of web dev, sometimes ignoring the 
day-to-day best practices that a more systematic effort yields.

So, I think there is a need for both the community-based approach you're 
calling for, and the more systematic and organized approach of a 
dedicated W3C activity.  In fact, I see those approaches acting 
hand-in-hand, where people participating in the W3C efforts find and vet 
community tutorials to link to, and talented tutorial creators can help 
contribute to the W3C effort.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/owea/wiki/Main_Page

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs

Received on Thursday, 5 August 2010 07:22:22 UTC