Archive for the 'webclass' Category

Talent isn’t everything

Published
by
Michael
on 15/4/2007
in learning, webclass and webdesign
. 0 Comments

One of our web design students from last year found the article Talent isn’t everything as she browsed her del.icio.us links last week… It’s a great article as it’s written by a junior designer who’s been working for 3 years now reflecting on the false assumption that only people with the design gift can make it in the design world.

The article is especially interesting to me because of the author’s encouragement to be pro-active about our own lifelong learning:

Effective and successful designers are lifelong learners. They are curious, enthusiastic, and passionate about design and want to learn more. This passion translates to better job satisfaction and productivity. They also:

  • Seek out mentors, perhaps a teacher, manager, or industry expert they admire.
  • Choose jobs based on those that let them learn the most. When you’ve stopped learning, it’s probably time to leave.
  • Have projects outside of work (such as cute productivity blogs).
  • Keep up with technology and become an early adopter.
  • Write about what they’ve learned and share it with others. It helps organize their thoughts.

Great advice from someone who’s “finished” their study and is now working as a junior designer. There’s lots of other worthwhile tips in the article too, so go give it a read: Talent isn’t everything.

Do we need teachers of web design

Published
by
Michael
on 19/3/2007
in learning, teaching, webclass and webdesign
. 17 Comments

The number of incredible learning resources being generated by professional web designers never ceases to amaze me. Over the past few years, the wealth of professional web development blogs and resources has literally redefined my role as a “teacher”. Whether it’s knowing what questions you might be asked in a web development job interview (or a second sample of interview questions) or providing excellent html and css tutorials for a learner, I cannot compete with the myriad of professionals out there to create better tutorials or resources for learners in our course. But nor do I need to…

As a recent example, just yesterday one of the largest media conferences finished up in Texas, SXSW. Anyone wanting to learn can watch, for example, the full 1hr video of a discussion with two prominent web developers called How to bluff your way in Web2.0 (and print or view the 100+ page slideshow from one of the presenters’ blogs)!
Another panel presentation at the same conference was all about getting some insight into the work habits of 20 top professionals:

Design Workflows @ Work

Have you ever wondered how the top designers work their magic? What is their workflow? What tools and techniques work best for them as they create compelling and inspiring designs?

But you didn’t have to be there - the presenters created a website and anyone who’s interested can read for themselves how twenty-six (yes, 26) current professional web designers get their jobs done on Design Workflows@work.

These resources are better than anything I could create for my students on my own… imagine the time involved for me to create a video about Web2.0 or interview 20+ professionals to find out how they get their jobs done, or even just create a list of common interview questions my students might be asked when applying for a job. I’d have no time left to spend with students in class!

So what then is my role in our learning group? How should I be spending my time in the classroom? What can I provide learners with that they can’t get from professionals on the net? Rather than answer that with my own thoughts, I’m keen to hear your thoughts… lemme know!

Visualising our learning

Published
by
Michael
on 26/1/2007
in education, learning, tafe and webclass
. 5 Comments

While preparing for the start of next semester (and at the same time trying to help my daughter learn basic life skills) I keep thinking how useful it would be to be able to visualise our individual learning in a way that:

  • DNA doube helixhighlights the relationships between different learning areas in our lives (perhaps using distance as a measure of interconnectedness)
  • shows the pathways of these different learning areas through time - including where we plan to go with our learning
  • superimposes learning threads of our friends or classmates.
  • allows me to zoom in and add branches or annotate like an interactive mind-map

Any ideas?

Should learners be learning intro to Javascript?

Published
by
Michael
on 15/11/2006
in asides, webclass and webdesign
. 5 Comments

Should learners be learning Javascript?

From Christian Montoya:

It is my opinion that we should not introduce Javascript to these students at all. There isn’t enough time to teach them how to use Javascript correctly, and there are more useful things we can teach them related to CSS and PHP. I think Javascript should be avoided altogether.

We do have time to learn a little more in our course… with activities like the JavaScript challenges for input validation, but it’s still a struggle for most people given that it’s their first taste of programming. I think most of us in the course just learn the basics - enough to learn more if we have time/are keen.

Perhaps we should do PHP first? Hmmm… unfortunately our new national qualification structure doesn’t allow it. (Note to self: add unobtrusive Javascript to challenges!)

Demonstrating Webdesign

Published
by
Michael
on 8/11/2006
in education, learning, reflection, tafe, webclass and webdesign
. 9 Comments

In our on-going effort to improve our Web Design learning experience we’ve been trying to listen very carefully to the feedback from our learners and update our program in response.

Back in June this year we started restructuring the learning pathway through the course into smaller yet holistic levels with individual deadlines/milestones. This was in response to feedback that, although participants enjoyed the freedom of learning with real projects and at a pace that suited their own needs, the resulting

  • lack of milestones to work towards and
  • the difficulty for the learner to gauge how far through the course they are themselves

were sources of frustration for learners!Now, after having run with the levels of webdesign for the past six months and listening to on-going feedback from our participants, I think it’s safe to say the following: (if you have other thoughts, please add a comment with your thoughts!)

  • Organising individual learning levels/learning agreements and setting corresponding short-term milestones with learners has been very helpful for many (not all) participants - giving short-term deadlines to work towards and breaking up the learning into manageable yet relevant chunks.
  • The individual learning levels have generally not helped to gauge how far through the course a learner is in terms of assessment (even if they have done so in terms of learning).
  • It requires substantial time to set up and manage 15-or-so individual learning levels with learners (but in my view, worthwhile).
  • It can be difficult for multiple facilitators to work with an individual to plan the learning levels. (Initially we were using electronic Learning Agreements - Word docs in a shared folder that learners could view but not edit - but this had a number of problems. We now create a new TODO list in our BaseCamp project whenever a student starts a new level. This means that potentially all the facilitators and the student can provide input, students can assign tasks to facilitators and negotiate their milestones.)

Now we’re also beginning to think about the possibility of offering the Diploma in Web Development second semester next year, so it’s a good time to take stock of student feedback and try to improve the learning experience once more! After talking with our students over the past while, there are two current issues that I can identify (but again, if I’ve missed something or you have other thoughts, please add a comment!):

  1. “What do I need to do to finish?” - As mentioned above, it’s difficult for learners to gauge their progress towards completing the course within a self-paced, project-based learning environment. Although the Learning Levels are helping students to gauge their learning progress, they don’t necessarily help gauge their assessment towards the qualification (the difference between learning skills and demonstrating competence in a certain unit). We do keep a folder for each student where we collect evidence for each unit and identify the units that they have already demonstrated, but it is a “teacher’s folder”.
  2. “Do I need to learn this?” or “Have we actually learned that?” - It is difficult for learners to gauge whether what they are learning is relevant/required for their qualification, or whether they are in-fact learning everything they require for the qualification - learners just have to trust me as the facilitator. As much as I’d love learners to jump at every opportunity to learn, they also have time constraints and need to focus their attention on what needs to get done to gain the qualification.

Demonstrating Webdesign: A possible solution

Up until this point, we’ve been using Evidence Sheets to help learners gather evidence for each unit of competency, but it’s always been under the control of the facilitator. I would sit down with the student and find evidence from the sites that they’ve been working on or the activities/challenges that they’ve completed, document it on the evidence sheet for that unit of competency before storing it in the folder.

My main reason for doing this was to protect the students from the Units of Competency, which, in the IT training package are often incredibly difficult to decipher and generally confuse learners.

Enter the new Demonstrating WebDesign site: (Edit: Moved to Wikiversity)

The purpose of DemonstratingWebDesign is to help you gather evidence to demonstrate your skills in Web Design as they relate to the following Australian qualifications:

  • ICA40305: Certificate IV in Information Technology (Websites)
  • ICA50605: Diploma in Information Technology (Website Development)

These resources are not designed to help you learn web design-related skills - although they may help you focus your learning. The resources that you find here at DemonstratingWebdesign are designed to help you demonstrate that you have learned the required skills, by gathering and documenting evidence of your skills in practise.

The idea is to build up a resource that will help students understand how each unit will benefit them, provide ideas for how they can demonstrate their competence, provide a link to the official unit of competence, and provide an evidence sheet for each unit that they can use to document their evidence against the criteria (with help where needed of course!)

I’m hoping that this, together with the current Web Design resources and processes will help learners gauge their progress through the course (in terms of knowing exactly how many units they’ve left to demonstrate and what they can do to demonstrate each unit), and provide a way for learners to keep me accountable in terms of what I “teach” (for want of a better word).

If you have a spare 5 minutes, please read the introduction on the Demonstrating Webdesign hope page and the example resource developed for the Australian Certificate IV in Websites. Especially if you are a student! I’d love to get feedback/comments as to whether you think this resource might help some of the issues that you’ve identified.

Edit (15/11/06): After discussion with others, I’ve moved the DemonstratingWebdesign resource to include it as part of the already established WebDesign@Wikiversity resources. Initially I thought that it would be good to use Wikispaces as the target audience is only Australian people learning web design, but then why not generalise the concept to include qualifications from other countries - and open up the channels for feedback and improvement?