Introducing Martin Wilkins and Connecting ICT

Hi Everyone

Just a brief message to introduce myself. I’m a front end web developer, self taught about 10 years ago. I’m currently working full time for a small company that offers web development & maintenance. I also help out in the local community. 

I’ve been following the list for a while and I’m really excited about the work going on here and how it fits in with my own ideas & plans. This plan includes moving into freelancing and to work more within the community and in education. Combining the education reforms in the UK, specifically the changes to the ICT Curriculum, and WebEd (which I came across via net.mag) I hope to be working towards aiding the outreach program where ever I can. 

When it comes to the ICT reforms the media seem to generally focus on the term ‘computer programming’ as the way forward for ICT. ICT covers many areas and based on the report compiled by the Royal Society the proposed reforms should hopefully help guide ICT education through all of these areas from the basics in computing through to Computer Programming, Web Design etc

This is a great time for WebEd and there is a fantastic opportunity to see all the great work created here for WebEd featured within the curriculum, even if to start with it’s a basic or beginners guide to Web Design & Development to get the younger people interested. I can then see this interest growing to a point where they can follow their WebEd learning on a higher education course built from these web standards specs.

I personally do not have any education contacts right now but my participation here would be to help make contact with the people and organisations in the community and education establishments so that they are aware of the WebEd resource, guidelines and standards and how much they can benefit from information the W3C provides here.


I’m interested in the research proposed by Helen Kennedy to look into the state of the web design curriculum but maybe more with an aim to identifying which areas need help and subsequently getting that help to those areas. I personally have no experience in the web design curriculum mainly due to the fact the ICT I was taught was very very basic and managed by a few teachers working under the difficult conditions of children that wanted to learn more and children that did not. So my self teachings came about during my Sixth Forms years through my own interest in computers and design and also the fact I was on an Art & Design course run by great teachers who knew the importance of research not just in books but also using the web to find out more.


Finally, a short message to Chris Mills. Do you still require submissions for the survey posted in January 2012?



Thanks for reading!

Martin Wilkins
Sheffield, UK