I'm not a university... Just a poor schmuck trying to stay afloat in
the world of web design/coding but a website like what you are
talking about would be very very helpful. I would be willing to help
in any way I could (Without charge unless you took up too much of my
family time :))
But otherwise if a website like that launches I would be a frequent
visitor and telling my friends about it :)
On Oct 22, 2007, at 2:45 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
At least in Universities (colleges - as in the English colleges,
not the
American term, may be different) my experience is that lecturers
have a
research area, which is why they are still in academia. Teaching
is just a
necessary evil they have to go through, especially if it is not
related to
their research interest. Then when it comes to web technologies,
they are
often further removed from even the subject of the lecture and
relegated to
"html is easy, go teach yourself" or it is just the technology to
print out the
stuff that your server side code (that is the important part you
get marked on)
generates. At least that is my experience wen doing a computer
science degree,
and masters, when we were doing anything that required displaying
the data in a
web browser instead of in a desktop application. Things like Swing
in Java
would get taught properly as it is fairly complex. HTML wouldn't
as it is
perceived to be easy stuff that even designers can do. Of course as
we all
know, a little knowledge can do a lot of harm. I don't have
experience from
courses that actually suppose to teach from a web design client
point of view,
instead of the server side.
Now, in some ways it is hard to blame lecturers for not knowing and
keeping up
to date on everything, and they often do have to teach a wide
amount of topics.
The client side world alone has a huge amount of technologies. I
think we as
big(ish) companies in the field (I'm talking about Opera here, and
companies
like Yahoo!, Google et al) could do more to reach out to
universities, colleges
and schools to say that we are big employers in the industry and we
require a
certain level in x topics for your students to be employable,
without a lot of
extra training on our part. It would probably be a big plus for
them to be
producing students employable by desirable companies. The problem
is that
there are far too many universities (never mind colleges and
schools) to reach
out to and go do a presentation to the students on campus. I
wouldn't want to
do the elitist thing and only go to the best schools either.
I've always thought of doing something like a web standards
curriculum pack,
either in printed or online form, that we put together as a suggested
curriculum for universities to give to students to either work
from if their
course is web design, or as a reference point if they are doing
server side
stuff and they are told to go away and learn themselves. t will be
much easier
for students as they will have all the information in one place and
wont be
swayed by bad quality articles online, and will be good for
lecturers as it
takes the leg work out of staying up to date. Opera has its new
dev.opera.com
site, where we are adding content, but don't have much that is
suitable for
that yet. If it is an idea that is of interest we could go away
and compile
the seminal articles on the web that designers should read, and get
permission
from the authors to distribute it, and update them if needed.
It'll be a lot
of work, but it will probably be worth it if universities are
interested.
David
--
Jason Pruim
Raoset Inc.
Technology Manager
MQC Specialist
3251 132nd ave
Holland, MI, 49424
www.raoset.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Jason Pruim
Raoset Inc.
Technology Manager
MQC Specialist
3251 132nd ave
Holland, MI, 49424
www.raoset.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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