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This is Around and About focusing on people and events in our community
If you spend any amount of time surfing the internet
you'll eventually develop an appreciation of a well developed web page.
The web developers that developed the code for those pages
probably learned their trade through independent study, trial and error.
This week Chattanooga is hosting the WE Rock Summit
to address industry standards and curriculum for web developers.
Leslie Jensen-Inman teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
and will be a guest speaker at the summit.
Leslie: The "WE" stands for "Web Education" because Web Education Rocks! UTC is hosting
and the Benwood and Lyndhurst Foundations are sponsoring along with other sponsors
who are bringing in a group of international web professionals from the
Open Web Education Alliance to come to Chattanooga to help write guidelines
and to write standards for web design and web development education.
Interviewer: If you flip through the catalog for most colleges and universities,
you might see a few classes that touch on web page development
but few graduates are trained and qualified to step directly into
corporate america as a web professional.
Leslie: There are not a lot of standards for web design or web development in
the classroom. You can find standards through organizations like the W3C and the
Web Standards Project but these have not necessarily been incorporated into
a classroom environment.
That is the disconect we are seeing, that industry is frustrated by education
because they are not being able to hire people right out of school, or even a couple
of years out of school because education is failing our students right now.
We have room to improve. It is not a hopeless situation and there are some
really amazing educators doing really great things. But we need to get together as
a whole community. Web professionals, educators, we need to all come together
and start writing these guidelines and start following through so that we can
prepare the next generation of web professionals.
Interviwer: eCommerce has been a growing trend for years. Developing successful
web sites for internet sales is an important part of that growth. The WE
Rock Summit will address standards to help bring web development skills
into the classrooms.
Leslie: Right now, a lot of people are learning web development on their own.
They are finding resources in books. They are finding resources online.
They are not finding, necessarily, the resources they need within the classroom
and we are hoping to change that.
There are different resources that have become available in the last year, year and a half
from organizations like the Web Standards Education Task Force which has a web site
and curriculum written for web standards and that is called the InterACT Curriculum.
Also, Opera. They have a curriculum called the Web Standards Curriculum. There are a
lot of different groups doing these really great things and kind of in pockets.
But with the Open Web Education Alliance, we are going to bring all of these people
together and bring all of these curriculum under one roof and figure out where
this really needs to go and how can these standards be brought into the classroom in
a way that is easy enough for educators to incorporate new curriculum.
It is really tough when you are an educator. You've got a ton of things to do. You must
be involved with your students. You have to plan for your classes. You have to do advising
and be there when your students need some emotional support. You are being pulled
in a million different ways, but it is also really important to stay up to date in your
field.
And web design and development moves so quickly. It is not quite the same as learning a
history where you can learn it and unless they find a new kind of historical reference,
it is going to be the same for many, many years.
But things change really quickly. So how do we get the best practices brought into the
classroom in ways that educators can incorporate very quickly. That make it easy for them
to get the information for themselves to keep up to date and also to give it to their
students.
Interviewer: Currently higher education will often spread web development skills across
multiple disciplines such as computer science, art,
marketing and communication courses.
Leslie: Every place of higher learning will handle this differently. Because
resources are different. So there will be opportunities to actually have a whole new
degree that really takes web standards and best practices into consideration. Which is
really exciting, because then students will be able to go out
into the working world (I don't like to say real world because students are in their own
real world) and get jobs, get decent jobs right out of school.
There are things out there. I'm still looking in to what those are at UTC.
There are opportunities to mix and match between computer science and the communications department,
the art department. We are all doing the best that we can. But I'm not sure it is good
enough yet. You know, if I had a child and they wanted to be a web developer, I'm not
sure I would tell them to go do anything except
go hang out in the basement and learn it all on their
own. And that misses a huge part of education. The teamwork. The being in a classroom
environment. Face-to-face time with professors is so valuable. Face-to-face time with your
fellow classmates and working with a team. These are skills you can't get working on
your own in a basement.
And so I think we all need to come together, which is sort of challenging to do because
you've got various departments and various degree requirements. And so, we might
need to look at this in a whole new way and find out how we can have a more integrated
program.
Interviewer: While the WE Rock Summit will be bringing together web specialists and
professionals to develop these standards, the hosts are also hoping to reach out to
the community with the WE Rock Tour this Thursday.
Leslie: The WE Rock Summit is an event that brings together these folks from the
Open Web Education Alliance. And the goal is to write a white paper that has
standards and guidelines for web education.
The WE Rock Tour is going to be a really awesome event. It is on Thursday, August 6, 2009 at
5:30pm at the Hunter (museum) and everyone is invited.
It is free and open to the public. We are going to have some of these really
amazing, smart, fun web folks here speaking. We will have six speakers and also a moderator.
The presentations will be short but informative. And then we are going to go on
and have a reception and we will celebrate Chattanooga's commitment to technology,
innovation and education.
We are bringing people from all over the world. We are bringing people from Sweden,
from Australia, from Canada, from all over the United States and we need to show them
that Chattanooga knows how to rock, to have a good time and that we really support education.
The web site to get information is www.webeducationrocks.com. The event is free and we do
recommend that you go to the web site and register. Registration is really important
because we do have some VIP goodies for the first
group of people who register. If you register, we will make sure we save those for you. And
other than that, it is first come, first served. So, if you register, you will get
some treats.
The WE Rock Summit will be August 5-8 ,2009. The WE Rock Tour will take place at the
Hunter Museum of American Art on Thursday, August 6, 2009 from 5:30pm to 8:00pm. You
can register and learn more about this event at www.webeducationrocks.com or by
calling 423-991-3016 for Around and About, this is Rabbit.
Around and About is a production of UTC with contributions by the staff and volunteers
of WUTC.