Re: Moving forward with web education work

It is a pleasure to have you on board Brennan - thanks for the great intro, wisdom and thoughts. I have really run out of time this week, but I will start giving you proper responses at the start of next week!

In the meantime, why not have a look around our Wiki (http://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/Main_Page) and familiarise yourself with what we have done so far.

All the best,

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 27 Jan 2012, at 18:35, <brennan@young.net> wrote:

> Hello, I just joined this group, and it appears that this is the right moment to introduce myself.
> 
> I am a Fine Art / Art History graduate from London University, entirely self-taught in programming and IT. I am born in 1970.
> 
> I have been teaching multimedia and web technologies since 1994, and now work at Copenhagen School of Design and Technology (kea.dk) teaching international students.
> 
> Our course is called 'multimedia design and communication' but has been dominated by web technologies since the demise of the CD-ROM (late 1990s). The course has four main subject areas: Interaction, Visualisation, Organisation and Communication. (Not an optimal taxonomy, but we can work with it).
> 
> We take some pains to teach open web standards, in particular (X)HTML and CSS, although it is not as painful today as it once was. We have also been introducing HTML5. Last semester we taught the new students HTML5 and CSS3 from the very beginning for the first time.
> 
> We think we are, if not at the bleeding edge, then at least keeping up with the most important developments, and we usually tell the students on the first day that some of the things they learn on the course will be out of date by the time they leave the course. (To their amazement!) We take great care to select topics which have a longer shelf-life, but often there is a fashion (e.g. today's fashion for mobile apps) which we have to cover.
> 
> Sometimes it is the teachers that are seduced by 'shiny objects', other times it is the students. I present Second Life as an example of a 'shiny object' technology which is as good as many others to teach multimedia with, but not necessarily the most optimal. We don't teach Second Life btw, although it was requested by some, during its heyday.
> 
> The most important skill is, of course, to prepare yourself to be able to pick up new skills, and to identifty which available technologies are worth special attention. I am not sure if we have cracked that nut yet, but some of our best students have, individually. :)
> 
> We are especially equipped to reflect on and discuss the special pedagogical challenges of an international 'audience'. We have evolved various didactic techniques to deal with intercultural issues such as attitudes to discipline and authority, expectations, group dynamics etc. In many ways, web programming is easier to teach a mixed group than (say) organisational theory.
> 
> I have *very* many more things to share with you all, but if I don't stop now, this message will never get sent.
> 
> I will wind down this message by mentioning that I am very pleased to make your acquaintance, and look forward to many fruitful exchanges.
> And I will finish with some sufi wisdom:
> 
> "Supposing we were discussing the art of weaving which might be developed. Supposing people were at the stage where they could ony tie knots in string, which gave them pleasure and might be regarded as a foretaste of weaving.
> If the people only imitated the knotting phase, and in addition regarded knotting as the entire art - when would weaving itself come into being, no much how much pleasure there was attached to it?
> Certainly, knotting would have a value as such: but it would also constitute a barrier to going further if the idea of anything further were 'abolished' by people thinking that knots were as far as anyone could go in textile work."
> -Idries Shah
>

Received on Friday, 27 January 2012 22:19:35 UTC