Web Design Education
by admin
It makes me sort of disappointed when I hear about college courses for web design and development that are teaching students how to write obsolete code. I develop front end code for a company in New Providence New Jersey and I learned how to do this on my own because it is my passion, but the natural course of action for anyone interested in learning web design and development is to go to school.
Now I am not going to say who or what is doing it wrong but I am going to say that recently I encountered a situation where the curriculum for a web design and development 101 class at a college was expect students to do the equivalent of saying, “Oh you drive a Honda Civic? Here are the keys to a Formula 1 Car, drive the Le Mans.” The class project started with building a web site with tables, building the web site with tables… That neither semantic nor helpful for that student to learn because if he or she is going on job interviews and they test him on how to build a web page nobody is going to hire someone who has the coding skills from 1999.
Most in the web design world will agree with me that a lot has changed from 1999, heck Internet Explorer 6 came out in 2001 and that is considered geriatric. The next step the class is asking the student to make is a site build with div’s for eCommerse… How one goes from table based portfolio page to div based eCommerse is behind me and is almost ridiculous.
A friend of mine Steven Guberman working for Fifth Room Creative, whom I met at DelveNYC this year, has promised to make a difference. He is soon becoming a professor at a college here in New Jersey and after hearing about this horrible display of teaching at one particular school here in New Jersey he has vowed that change is on the rise, and I am happy to support him.
I too am trying to figure out a way to make a difference, to make a change to prepare students who are actually interested in the field for a possible career change or career start to get on the right track. Let me know below in the comments or e-mail me at iamfrankstallone AT gmail DOT com if you have any ideas or advice!
Comments
I am currently a student and I didn’t study web design in college for that exact reason, even though I knew it was what I wanted to do. I have a few friends in the web design program and their homework is pitifully outdated, like you said. I’ve tried to get them to change their ways or even start to teach themselves, but it has little effect because I’m “only a student” and not a tenured professor.
It’s an unfortunate situation, but it will work out for the ones who actually do have a passion for web design: the ones who are teaching themselves and making their own curriculum. They’re the ones who will be able to get a job at an innovative and meaningful company, not one stuck in a time machine on the 1990s setting.
I live by this quote:
“Don’t let school get in the way of your education.”
It is an interesting situation. On one hand the internet is changing almost daily because it is just simply such a new medium and on the hand you have college curriculum that is outdated. There are people out there making a difference.
When I went to college the web design teacher pretty much let me do whatever I wanted to for the class; I never said I had more knowledge than him instead I asked him if I could build a site with semantic markup and explain it to the class. So I did, I got up on the white board and drew out div’s, wrote out the basic CSS (I think I was using floats for positioning exclusively back then) and it went very well. The students that were a little more advanced than ‘building a site with tables’ greatly appreciated it as did the older crowd who knew there was something they were missing.
I admire anybody with a passion for what they do, and I agree with your quote completely. I have gone really far in this field because I simply love it, I read about it all the time and follow/interact with people whom I believe do it ‘right’ on twitter and other social mediums. Thanks for your comments I appreciate it! =)
Hi Frank,
You might be very interested in one of our initiatives at WaSP — the Interact Curriculum. Take a look around. See if you like what you see and if so, help spread the word
Derek first I want to say thank you for visiting my site, I am flattered humbled and pleased all at the same time. Your speech at FOWD was the most moving, mostly because of your story, which is where I connect; I was diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 16 and have since gone through remission. I was able to briefly review the Interact Curriculum by WaSP and love what I see. I have a few friends who are about to or do teach at colleges and I will be passing this on to them. Thanks again and I will help spread the word! =D