• 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

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.

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.

Feedburner is a web service that transforms regular web pages or news feeds into custom news feeds with static URLs that you can manage through a single account. Feedburner produces a human-readable version of a feed. And since Feedburner is now owned by Google, you can use your existing Google account.

Once logged in to Feedburner.com, create your own new feed by pasting in the URL of the web page or news feed you want to target.

This will produce a Feedburner feed with its own unique URL–make note of that URL from the address bar; we’ll need it to create the iframe in our Canvas course.

The iframe HTML element embeds any URL into a window within a web page. To add an iframe to a Canvas Page, open the Page, click Switch Views to access the HTML, and then type the iframe tags. For example:

…where the SRC attribute value is your Feedburner URL. After saving the Canvas page, you may have to refresh in order to see the results:

In this case, the Feedburner feed is actually a conglomeration of different feeds collected and organized in Google Reader. After sharing the GReader folder, I used Feedburner to convert GReader’s Atom feed into a new feed. This was necessary because Google Reader blocks use of iframes for its shared feeds.

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.

You might think that Apple holds both [the open web and the App Store] in equal esteem, but
its release of Safari 5 shows that Apple has less regard for publishers on the Web than it does for publishers (and developers) it wants to entice to come to the App Store.

And the App Store is becoming its own little mirror-reflection of the Web. You’ve got content from news providers, you’ve got social networking, you’ve got games, RSS readers—the list goes on and on. You’ve also got, courtesy of Apple, a 100 percent Apple-owned, Apple-powered advertising platform called iAds.

…

in the end we’re left with a) an open platform [Safari] where Apple is willing to toy with Web publishers, modify their content presentation, and suppress their ads, and b) Apple’s curated, closed platform, where everything is done by Apple’s rules or it’s not done at all.

Fisher is honing in on Safari’s new Reader feature, a space Arc90 has been treading for some time. So it’s somewhat synchronistic that Arc90 echoes the original frustration with Apple’s anti-open web model (though not it’s Reader) in the blog post, “Why We Built Readability” comments,

…publishing finds itself looking elsewhere to solve the puzzle of distributing and monetizing. Magazines like Time, Wired and Popular Science have decided to invest in delivering purchasable “packages” of their content that work on Apple’s iPad.

…

For us, the Web is the right bet. The notion of tethering content delivery to a particular proprietary platform or hardware device is admitting defeat.

Disclaimer: I am no longer a full-time freelance web developer. Indeed, I haven’t been a full-time web developer for a number of years, though I do still take projects on the side.

I did, however, think I had enough info to write out the following rather lengthy answer, which I hope to refine and turn into a lesson page later on this semester. There are quite a few better sources to turn to than I, and there have been a few recent articles and books on this subject, but here’s how I framed this particular answer in a way that hopefully walks the student through my thought process and tips them off to at least a few of the bigger picture items that must be considered sooner or later:

First, you need to decide if you’re going to charge hourly or lump sum. I prefer the latter, and I think clients do too.

Even so, I still start by calculating how much I need to be earning per hour–this is a figure I keep internally, and don’t share with clients.

Then, start adding upwards.

For instance, now that you’re working freelance you’re considered to be self-employed by the US Government, and will need to add about 30% for Federal taxes on top of everything else. (Make sure you put that 30% in a separate bank account!) What about State taxes? That varies state-to-state, so check your local codes.

There’s also a matter of other costs you’ll eventually need to roll in to your charges, especially if you look at doing this full time: What about Internet access, computers, software, electricity — these don’t come free! Do you need this work to pay for benefits for you/your family (health insurance, dental, life, etc)? What about advertising (if any) or time spent drumming up business? These need to be absorbed, too.

I’m going to keep it simple in this example and exclude those costs, and I think you probably don’t have to worry too much about this when you’re first starting up–especially if you’re doing freelance in addition to another job. However, be sure to consider these costs later after you move your business forward.

So if that the take-home amount is, say, $15/hour (which is not too bad for someone just starting out–most of my student developers get less than that) first add 30% for taxes, rounding up to $20/hour.

Then, figure that if you were doing this full time you’d be working at least 40 hours a week at least 4 weeks a month. This gives you a number through which you can absorb business costs on a per-hour basis by simple division. So if I’m working from a home office my internet, electricity (for just my office), computer upkeep might add up $160 a month, which is convenient because it means I just add another dollar to my hourly rate. Etc.

The next number to determine is tougher. How many hours will the project take you? Be realistic, and include meeting times. The best way to know for sure is to have tracked your time on projects in the past. I’ll give you just one example: I wrote XHTML and CSS for someone’s resume the other weekend, which turned out to be a 3 hour job including the initial meeting, and some minor experimentation with CSS 3′s @font-face property at the client’s request. Then I spent an hour testing it across browsers and making minor adjustments. So 4 hours for 1 page of content.

In this case we just needed one page, but in sites with multiple pages using templates will make things go faster. Because of this I usually charge on a first-page, additional-page basis, if that makes sense.

At any rate, it’s common to undercharge early on by not accurately estimating the time involved. And that’s OK early on, because you’re learning! But learn from your mistakes, and track your hours, so that in the future you can be more on-target and provide good service at competitive rates. Consider using a project management or time-tracking tool to help you with this.

Another practice I’ve heard others use in the past is to take my estimated time for a project and double it. This is based on the presumption that we always underestimate how much time tasks take us. I think this is true initially.

So now I know my per hour rate ($21), and I’m confident that for a media-free (text-based) static page it takes me about 4 hours. So I might charge $80 for that first page, and, using that first page as a template, charge $20 for each additional page. Now we’re starting to have a basic formula!

Oh, but what if you have to do visual design? Logo design? Will it take you 20 hours to come up with a good visual design? 40? 60? What about changes the client will inevitably request? Certainly you want to include the client at each step, from thumbnails to comps to finished versions. Heavy involvement early on will reduce the likelihood of conflict and frustration later.

Now if Javascript or PHP come into it, we start talking big money. Not just because it takes longer to develop, but because you must work with other people’s web servers, you must be secure, your code must not break on any browser, you must case-test for a number of different user scenarios, etc.

Don’t be afraid to ask yourself if you need to outsource tasks where your skills are not yet adequate. This is a good way to ensure your client gets what they are paying for–and can save you time in the long run. For instance, if I had a client needing a Flex app, I’m not going to spend 200 hours on it when a skilled Flex developer could do it in half that time. Sure, I have to pay them, but sometimes you can barter your skills for theirs.

Finally, make and maintain a master list of services you could provide with a dollar charge next to each, i.e. Basic web page production (HTML & CSS): $200 first page, $50 each addtl page. MySQL database set up: $50 per table, limit 30 fields. etc. I keep my own Excel spreadsheet with as many options as I can think of, and I modify this as I learn more about my own time, resource expenditures, and costs.

That’s it. As I said, this was just an e-mail I kicked out to a student, and this omits important info on contracts and agreements, but it’s a big topic, one which I expect to reflect upon and revisit in this or another post.

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 Apple controls not only the specifications for apps, but also restricts what apps are made available for use on their product, censors content, and even denies what technologies can be used to produce such apps.

Apple has the right to do all this, of course–it’s their device. Even though the approach out-M$s Microsoft, Apple’s restrictions on production and content of the apps is only one side of a larger problem. What really concerns me is how Apple’s app model will impact digital content on the open web, and I’m not talking about Flash.

The Web as an App

We’ve seen already a number of apps that replicate core functionality of web sites. We’re starting to see more apps produced by content providers as a supplement to their existing web-based content (e.g. Wired, NPR, WSJ). But how long until this supplement supplants the web-based stream? How long until consumers are hooked into fee-based access to this content under the illusion that it’s only available through the app?
I believe Apple has been rather insidious, if clever, in their iPhone/iPad app model, wherein the closed nature of their system requires a kind of fake innovation in the development of “new” apps that do little more than their web-based cousins; certainly little more than what’s already possible with a web browser and a little creative use of standards-based web languages. Instead, these appear to be little more than an opportunity for approved providers to elicit fees in new ways from end-users.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for businesses finding new ways to make money by improving service or a product, but is that what we are getting here? The drive to develop web-based products as apps seems entirely backwards, for we already have the one tool we need to facilitate mobility of both content and services: the standards-compliant web browser. What technologies do we need? Not C, C++, or even Flash, but how about HTML, CSS, Javascript, XML, and PHP? How about the open web standards that have facilitated the information access revolution we are experiencing?

Now a “special” path to mobile device development is nothing new; even the W3 tried to sell us on HDML rather than alternative CSS and minimalistic but semantically correct XHTML. But I think time has proven that this is wasted effort in the face of a broadly-accepted, dually-purposed web site constructed on sound principles of web design and utilizing creative applications of open technologies. Even NPR seems to prove this point by the fact that it has not only released it’s own iPad app, it’s also reworked it’s web site to be “iPad-friendly” for those who don’t want to download the (free) app. And at first glance it looks like the web site provides the same essential features.

Enter Blackboard

As expected, in an attempt to capitalize on the iPad buzz and finally make good on years of broken promises for mobile accessibility, Blackboard has unveiled its iPad app, which

recreates the course experience of Blackboard Learn™ … and lets students check grades and assignments, add discussion board comments and blog posts, email instructors and classmates

How stunningly innovative! I surely couldn’t do any of that on a mobile web browser?

I probably rehash this example too often, but I remember sitting in a session at a WebCT conference 5 years ago that was supposed to reveal WebCT’s innovations in mobile delivery of content. Turned out the WebCT rep had nothing to share, but hoped to take ideas from the audience. Disappointed, I turned to my Palm Treo phone and did some grading through Blazer on Moodle. Though the HTML, CSS, and Javascript of Moodle was still disappointingly primitive at the time, it was just good enough that the weak Blazer browser could handle it, and demonstrated the power of using open web standards.

Michael Feldstein suggests that this sort of “innovation” will promote the iPad itself, saying, “if I were a student or faculty member heavily using Blackboard and thinking about buying an iPad, I might find this app to be an additional motivator to buy one”. I bet Bb is hoping the reverse of this will be true: that by providing all their students with an iPad colleges like Seton Hill and George Fox will create a scenario that fits just right with their particular e-learning solution, which is “the industry leader” with full support for “mobile devices”.

This restrictive piping of information that we currently take for granted on the open web is of greatest concern to educators, perhaps, because it has the potential to retard the development of new models of learning. I don’t mean “learning by doing”, though iPad’s failure to support creative production is notable (Jeff Jarvis writes, “It turns us back into an audience again”); I mean particularly developing models that encourage increased learner self-regulation and networked direction along variable learning paths. Such models require access–both broad and deep–to information and depend upon content aggregation, parsing, and re-dissemination. These capabilities have only recently begun to be realized through the open web, thanks in large part to web standards. What schism might the apps model cause in this new standard of information accessibility? What locks and limitations may now encrust upon the ideals of the open web?

.post img { max-width: 100%; }

This prevents the sort of thing we often see when an image is slapped into a blog post without being resized especially for that design. Here’s an example this just popped up in my Google Reader:

In addition to preventing IMGs from breaking out of the box (or, worse, growing the box) this can be applied to other elements as well. In the case of my themes’ CSS I also include OBJECT (and, just to be safe, EMBED):

.post img, .post object, .post embed { max-width: 100%; }

With the entrance of HTML 5 one can imagine adding/replacing AUDIO and VIDEO in this list of selectors.

I’m thinking about this today because on Twitter Jeffrey Zeldman RT’ed Stephanie Hobson quoting Ethan Marcotte:

This is a fine solution, and reminded me that just last week I was talking with colleague Ken Woodward applying max-width in a more generic fashion–more generic, even, than to all IMGs:

div * { max-width: 100%; }

This is very broad, of course, and could cause problems in a number of particular designs, however I’m thinking the principle is still valid, particularly as it applies to inline elements, for the W3 reminds us:

If an inline box cannot be split (e.g., if the inline box contains a single character, or language specific word breaking rules disallow a break within the inline box, or if the inline box is affected by a white-space value of nowrap or pre), then the inline box overflows the line box.

Why wouldn’t I just write the rule without the DIV ancestor? Most elements that I need to control naturally fall within a DIV, and this limitation helps me feel safer, though I haven’t done enough testing to see how when/where it might fail. I am certain there is probably not enough specificity to override width problems that may be caused by miscalculated pixel widths of directly targeted descendant elements (i.e. DIVs), but those should probably have been done in percentages anyway. If specificity is a problem, adding a relevant parent CLASS or ID to the selector could probably solve it.

To be clear, we don’t really know what a model PLN looks like, or how it works, or if it’s efficient; we may not even know what the difference between a PLE and a PLN is. It may be that the one thing we can say definitively is we don’t know what a PLN looks like, for any two are unlikely to be the same. It may be that we want a PLN to resist being reified. When I think of a PLN/PLE I try to keep it open-ended; I conjecture that it is shaped by habits formed in the accomplishment of daily tasks, is connected to resources for discovery of new information, and is fostered by social relationships that may be authentic and trusting or merely incidental, built by one-to-one/one-to-many communications. Many of the facets of a PLN–but especially the social aspects–are increasingly open to the world.

I think we know what a LMS looks like: it is typically a monolithic, institutionally-controlled system that provides user accounts and digital space for the tasks of teaching and learning. A LMS is likely to allow file storage and redistribution, private and public communication, user tracking and logging, assignment management, timed/semi-secure assessment, and so on. Even more so than a traditional classroom, a LMS course environment is nearly always closed to the world.

Jon hit most of the primary strengths and weaknesses of each already, but I wanted to add or expand the list a little, but really just take this chance to brain dump and play both sides of a still relevant issue:

LMS Strengths

1. One-stop shopping. Not only do instructors build everything in one place, students can reach all aspects of the course in a single silo (except in the case of ePacks). Related: tools look and act similarly.
2. Bred by educators. Features are based on feedback and requests from a community of educators (theoretically).
3. Attention of ed tech market. Not only to CIOs attend to education-centric software products, third-party companies (textbook publishers to advanced communication tools such as Wimba) build content and products to work with the LMS.
4. Many models of academic use are available as examples or objects of criticism, especially in fully online courses.
5. Potentially greater latitude in using third-party materials under Fair Use or TEACH act. At any rate, many vague, fuzzy, or even illegal uses of third-party material by faculty are masked by closed system.
6. A closed environment–the metaphorical “walled garden”–may encourage students to freely express themselves.

LMS Weaknesses

1. LMS companies seem prone to buy-out, and thus may “pull the rug” out from adoptive institutions.
2. Adoption often requires licensing, which may inhibit switching, or may impel adoption of new versions.
3. Quality of third-party products and integration is often poor, inhibiting access and blemishing the experience.
4. Improvements, features, and fixes are historically are slow.
5. Design may encourage outdated, limiting, or less effective teaching practices.
6. With the exception of Moodle and Sakai, most LMS are closed source (in spite of Blackboard’s claims to be “open”).

PLE Strengths

1. Tools are based on “real world” needs, uses, and practices, and are more likely to be “authentic”.
2. Tools are likely to be coded or scripted according to broadly adopted standards.
3. Stability may be based on community adoption and support as well as financial viability.
4. Students may engage with communities of practice—real experts operating in their profession.
5. 50 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. Unable to rely upon corporate contracts or other adoption criteria, Web 2.0 tools rely on continued user support and expanded adoption.

PLE Weaknesses

1. Few models or case studies to use as examples or objects of criticism.
2. Tools often require terms of service agreements peculiar to the product company.
3. Likely not designed specifically for education.
4. For interoperability or data harvesting data must be both open and standardized.
5. Related to institutional control of data, data may be impermanent.
6. Some individuals may disdain open publishing or prefer to maintain privacy.

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