Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

I maintain a Diigo Group specifically for my online Web Design class that, unlike services in a traditional LMS, doesn’t have to die at the end of the semester. Students elect to become members of the Diigo Group, and use the Diigo browser add-on to quickly share and comment on blog posts or articles that they find relevant with the Group (i.e. the class). Diigo also provides tools to tag, comment on, and highlight passages from the article (I haven’t required this, but probably would in a special topics class that focused more on new practices and methods in web design and development).

I actually first started this activity with a simple wiki page listing relevant articles that the class could contribute to. I also used a Delicious account with a for: tag that I linked to from the wiki for more current articles. Both were eventually replaced by this Diigo Group.

Diigo + Canvas

Diigo is the mechanism for both the bookmarking and the archiving of these web pages, and students are able to subscribe to the Diigo Group’s new bookmarks, but I am able to go a step further thanks to Canvas*.

Diigo produces an RSS feed, and Canvas can subscribe to any number of feeds. So I simply add the Diigo Group feed to the Canvas course Announcements. This means that any time a new Diigo Group bookmark is made, Canvas automatically posts it as a hyperlink in a new Announcement.

Students are able to control how Canvas automatically notifies them of announcements (e.g. via email, text, twitter, whatever) as well as the frequency of these notifications (e.g. right away, once a day, etc).

So, in addition to the Diigo archive of bookmarks, Canvas will keep a secondary record of all the bookmarks made in the Diigo Group for the entire semester. This simple act of syndication provides students with additional avenues by which they can choose to learn about new resources–especially important for students who may not yet be comfortable venturing outside of the traditional classroom space.

That’s the mechanism for the activity, but the activity itself is clearly founded in the first learning outcome described above. But I think there are some indirect benefits to this activity as well. For instance, I encourage students to find and read blogs in addition to web design magazines, because, in this field at least, blogs are the best way to share new information fast. Frankly, web design has little need of academics for the general practice; for the theory of usability and visual design? Sure. But most new information goes out through informal publications like blogs and forums.

Focusing attention toward blogs presents students a golden opportunity to be up close and almost-personal to web design luminaries like Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyers, Tantek Celik, Cameron Moll, and more. By following the writings of practicing professionals in the field, I hope students might develop their view of the field, and even fall into some indirect cognitive apprenticeship and accidental learning. And by engaging in the rich, deep, and sometimes contentious discussions of techniques found on web sites like Smashing Magazine or A List Apart, students will have begun participating in the actual practitioner community.

My hope is that students will not drop out of the Diigo Group after the semester’s end. But if they do, and many have, I hope they will, at least, continue the practice of bookmarking and sharing new articles and web sites to support their continual engagement in the field — using their own tools, in their own space, choosing whatever methods suit them best.

* I currently work for Instructure, makers of Canvas.

This semester will probably be the last time I teach Web Design online, at least for a while (I’ll continue to teach online, but not this particular course). This brings me down, as I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of guiding students toward web standards-based web design practices that are grounded in visual design theory, usability research, and current techniques over the past (ahem) seven years.

I’ve also prided myself in being one of the few instructors in the department who has actual professional experience as a web designer and developer, with the kind of practical skill that is only born of hundreds of hours of hands-on drafting, markup, scripting, and debugging. Lots, and lots, and lots of debugging.

To reflect on the experience of teaching Web Design online, and celebrate the opportunity that I’ve had as a lowly adjunct, I want to post a few pieces describing activities that have been designed, redesigned, scrapped, and reinvented over the semesters. I won’t cover all the learning activities, let alone the outcomes that we aimed for, but there are a few that stand out for their elegance and importance for burgeoning web designers.

Currency and relevance were of paramount influence on my design of this online course. Students in the field of digital media needed to graduate with in-demand skills and up-to-date information about the field in order to compete for the best jobs, and they need to be encouraged to develop the habits that will help them maintain their own skill and currency.

To this end, I wanted students to learn to be critical of the information they encounter, reflective of their own practice, and always hungry to learn more; indeed, these are key traits that I valued in my own employees, not just web developers. Anyone can learn to write HTML and CSS, but how many strive to do it right? Continually improving technique, efficiency, elegance?

I wanted to give students another edge, too: I wanted each to grow social or professional connections with the online community of web designers–including their classmates.

With these outcomes in mind I developed activities that utilized authentic web tools that offered the potential of forming habits and building connections both within and beyond the class enrollment.

The course I taught inherited generalized learning objectives from the curriculum, however I would restate some of these to reflect my own conclusions, including:

• Develop habits and practices that maintain currency with new information in the field
• Evaluate web design information, practices, and techniques for currency, utility, and elegance
• Reflect on, critique, and (re)share new information, practices, and techniques

To help students achieve these outcomes, I focused on two activities: bookmark sharing via Diigo, and blogging on whatever platform they preferred. I’ll explain each in subsequent posts.

Instructure Canvas features a pretty powerful Pages tool that allows for rich text editing, quick linking to tools and activities, and embedding multimedia. It does not, unfortunately, support the embedding of RSS or Atom news feeds. Pages strips out your Javascript, too, so there’s no use trying to roll your own feed parser. But there is a work-around: use Feedburner and an IFRAME (more…)

Here are the three haikus I composed and posted to Zeldman’s site in honor of Web Standards (aka Blue Beanie) Day:

Meaning-raked markup
made bright by Garden’s shadow.
This path needs no guide.

CSS-set stones
swim free like dragon hatchlings
but wake tsunamis.

With each walk through code
the gardener breathes deeply,
expelling prolix lines.

Alright, so maybe “war” is overstating it, but as I argued earlier this year Apple is very much posturing itself against the idea of the open web and for the closed consumption environment controlled by its Apps. I stumbled on a couple follow-up posts that follow-up and nuance this debate (more…)

Today I received an e-mail from a former student asking a common question: how do I know what to charge clients for web design/development? (more…)

There’s so much buzz about the iPad you can taste it! And it ain’t all minty! I got my paws on one Tuesday afternoon, and found it not revolutionary as Apple prophesied, but rather as many have described: a big iPod Touch (which is essentially a phone-less iPhone).

Now like the iPhone/Touch the iPad can use thousands of “apps”– miniature applications developed solely for use on iPhone/iTouch/iPad, and sold through the Apple store. What’s always been disconcerting about the app development process is that (more…)

The CSS max-width property has long been a favorite of mine, most often used to restrict the flow of content depending on the user’s browser, such as we see in elastic layouts. Since I began making WordPress themes a couple years ago I’ve used max-width as a staple rule for media in my stylesheet, starting with images that might appear in a post (e.g. .post) (more…)

Jon Mott blogged about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the course management system (CMS, aka LMS or VLE) and a personal learning network (PLN, sometimes associated/equated with PLE). The LMS/PLE “dilemma” has been itching my brain for some time now, so Jon’s post was a timely motivator to begin to think the issue through in print (more…)

I began the following Google Wave yesterday as a means of orienting myself to its functionality and features, but more importantly as a way to move past the more mundane and obvious applications for education. As you will see, I invited a number of colleagues and contacts to join, then made the Wave open to the public (more…)