Re: Moving forward with web education work

Should we also aim kids? Github organizes such thing :
https://github.com/blog/1034-kids-are-the-future-teach-em-to-code

May be we can prepare such things for kids Or we can poke someone from
Github and they may prepare those things for WebEd community?

2012/2/6 Chris Mills <cmills@opera.com>

> Thanks Prisca! We weill definitely explore what to do for
> teaching/beginners. Getting some feedback from your colleagues would also
> be much appreciated, if you can find the time.
>
> Chris Mills
> Open standards evangelist and dev.opera.com editor, Opera Software
> Co-chair, web education community group, W3C
>
> * Try Opera: http://www.opera.com
> * Learn about the latest open standards technologies and techniques:
> http://dev.opera.com
> * Contribute to web education: http://www.w3.org/community/webed/
>
> On 5 Feb 2012, at 15:09, prisca wrote:
>
> Chris ;)
>
> thanks for geting back to me about my points :)
> (and no need to say sorry - you weren't grumpy :) :) :) )
>
> About doing work ~ yes, please, do feel free to hand me a task and let me
> get onto it when I can - that sounds good to me ;)
>
> About the tutorials and the learning materials generally...
> glad to see that Anna agrees with some of my points here. I think it is
> the nature of the presentation on the site - the lengthy text without
> sufficient visuals which makes this less suitable for teachers who are new
> to the web subject and students of entry levels.
>
> The idea of slideshows sounds good - or even just more illustrated
> examples.
> Rachel Andrew just published a post on the topic of writing tutorials for
> beginners, very good points:
> http://www.rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2012/02/05/writing-beginner-level-tutorials/
>
> About getting feedback: yeah, I know - this one is hard....  especially
> considering the ever growing paperwork teacher have to deal with... so I
> don't have any solid answers here, but I feel very strongly that this
> resource we're building will only be useful if tested and edited to suit...
> I will ask my colleagues about this when I can catch them next time. Maybe
> they might have some suggestions for us which we havent' thought of... will
> let you know ...
>
> About my suggestion of a forum: that might of course just be me.... was
> just an idea ;)
> For getting feedback on specific resources etc... I do think it would make
> sense.
>
> Will get back to your survey in a minute as well :)
>
> Stay warm and enjoy the snow :)
> Prisca
>
> ___________________________________________________
> Prisca Schmarsow ✪ 07969 713 329
> graphiceyedea.co.uk *•* eyelearn.org *•* webeyedea.info
> student forum:
> eyelearn.org/forum
> ___________________________________________________
>
>
>
>
> On 30 January 2012 16:39, Chris Mills <cmills@opera.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 27 Jan 2012, at 14:40, prisca wrote:
>>
>> Hey Chris :)
>>
>> echoing others - all I can do is apologise sorry for not replying
>> sooner.... especially after I mentioned  my struggles to you with trying to
>> get involved here....
>> sorry about that...
>>
>>
>> No worries at all - I'm sorry if I came across as being a bit grumpy last
>> week.
>>
>>
>> all this does though is highlight the problem that I have - and many
>> others who are teaching might have the same issues. With the overload of
>> bureaucracy demanded for documenting learner's progress etc now growing
>> more and more each year it seems - this does take time away from everything
>> else.
>>
>>
>> I am certainly hearing this from a lot of other educators too - so much
>> more paperwork to deal with, leading to less time for actual personal
>> development and projects like this.
>>
>>
>> I'm delivering teaching for web - and I would love to contribute - but
>> keeping up with the messages via this email group with lots of useful
>> suggestions and comments I found hard and almost impossible, simply due to
>> the sheer amount of emails. I tried to read them all - couldn't find the
>> time, I tried to comment on some of the thoughts brought forward and some
>> of the ideas I had - again, lack of time and keeping track of the comments
>> meant I didn't do that either.
>>
>>
>> Ok, so perhaps it would work better if I just handed you a task here and
>> there, or asked for feedback on something when needed, and you can dig in
>> if you have time, rather than me expecting you to keep up with the whole
>> list?
>>
>>
>> I love where this is going and can see how brilliant this could be -
>> however - I am getting worried about how suitable some of these materials
>> would be for teaching, especially for entry level students. I can only go
>> by colleagues of mine who are delivering A-Levels, GCSEs and level 1/2
>> courses - and who are now all asked to deliver web related units.
>> I always have to think of Anna Debenham and what she highlighted in her
>> talks, silly units, odd requirements etc...
>>
>> Looking at the bits that I managed to keep up with on here - I couldn't
>> see anything that I could forward to them to help them out. All seemed much
>> more related to proper web design/development teaching - all a bit too
>> advanced , perhaps too technically worded for my colleagues to be able to
>> use easily. I'm sure those resources will be brilliant for courses which
>> aim to train up the new cohort of webdesigners/developers - so that's all
>> good.
>>
>> However, how about the entry level - the practical approach to teaching
>> people only the very basics - to get nice project brief written to apply
>> those skills, to have teaching material that could be used in the class
>> room - for both adults and younger age groups?
>> All I know is that a lot of teaching is really out of date - and that
>> starts with the entry level or more introductory teaching, not only the
>> full on web related courses only.
>>
>>
>> Please don't get me wrong - for example, the Web Standards Curriculum<http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/1-introduction-to-the-web-standards-cur/>is truly fantastic - very useful and a brilliant resource for all,
>> accessible easily etc etc.... I have tried to use it in class - and my
>> students are adults, aiming to work as webdesigners. So I thought it will
>> be perfect - the right target group for this sort of content, writing style
>> and level.
>> But my individual lessons with more visual documentation (often not
>> always) and a more custom presentation, like coloured arrows, highlighted
>> text and plenty of screenshots are the ones my students tend to take to
>> much easier than the brilliant articles on the Web Standards Curriculum ...
>> to my surprise.
>> (an example, just to show you what I mean, here's a tutorial on FireFTP I
>> wrote 5 years ago by now...:
>> http://graphiceyedea.co.uk/11/upload-via-ftp-in-firefox-fireftp - very
>> popular with students who seem to refer back to outside of class and cope
>> just fine with solving issues themselves)
>>
>> Considering my colleagues and their students who need to do web only as a
>> small part of their courses - all this is even more of an issue....
>>
>>
>> So basically what you are saying is that the tutorials as they stand are
>> not immediately useful for actual teaching. I talked to Anna Debenham about
>> this earlier today actually, and she said very similar things.
>>
>> So maybe we should treat the tutorials as learning material for people
>> whom that approach suits, and background learning for teachers to read
>> before the class, and for advanced students  but then create a set of
>> bridging materials for actually teaching the classes with?
>>
>> These could take the form of slideshows that teach the syntax and basic
>> concepts in a very visual and non-wordy way, coupled with exercises to give
>> the students to do, to actually learn the stuff in practice. (And their
>> solutions of course). This would probably fit in well with the curriculum
>> structures.
>>
>> Would this be a better approach?
>>
>> I could try to create a prototype to show you all.
>>
>>
>>
>> Now, I'm not saying I have any answers here — these are just a few
>> thoughts which I meant to commment on much sooner....
>>
>> Basically, I'm worried there's lots of time spent creating, collating and
>> producing resources which might be wrong for teaching in the classroom and
>> be more of a reference for more advanced students, rather than a practical
>> solution right now.
>> I think we need people who need to teach web to test these as we go along
>> - get feedback during the process and amend/edit to suit.
>>
>>
>> Yes, we absolutely need to get it right asap, as we have such limited
>> resources to do this.
>>
>>
>>
>> I thought that maybe a forum might be a better way for us all to move
>> things forward? Possibly organised into categories by level, filter option
>> by tag for topics?
>> I feel I would be able to manage that better ~ for example, if I write up
>> something for my students anyway - say about typography<http://graphiceyedea.co.uk/11/typography-for-the-web/>- I could then just add this to the right category on the forum, get
>> feedback - or share it is as resource.
>>
>>
>> I am not sure - I think this might be more of a personal preference
>> thing. I personally find forums a lot more fiddly to handle than e-mail
>> lists. Has anyone else got any strong feelings on this?
>>
>> Maybe we could organise a hybrid approach? Perhaps use e-mail, but then
>> add tags into the subject line if the thread concerns one particular
>> subject, or is or particular relevance to one or two people?
>>
>>
>> As for getting my colleagues some support in their teaching - they might
>> not have time or motivation to be involved directly themselves - but a
>> forum might offer the right platform for them to find useful resources to
>> use immediately, try out and give feedback directly. I imagine lots of good
>> input on wording and illustrative examples.
>>
>>
>> Ok, I can see how a public forum might be useful for getting wider
>> feedback from a group of occasional contributors, for example if we want to
>> solicit feedback.
>>
>> I'll mull this over!
>>
>> thanks so much for your feedback,
>>
>> Chris
>>
>
>
>


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