Your comments reminded me that I had neglected to mention something else
regarding my TAFE experiences. Perhaps I should mention that I am 50
years of age and attended as a mature age student and not someone out of
high school, however despite all amounts of agitating and lobbying, the
Bendigo TAFE refused to provide access to Firefox or Opera or any other
browser apart from IE. That was the only browser that you could use to
access the outside world. You couldn't install or run your own versions
locally, so consequently Firefox and the Web Developer Extension were
not available to test your sites or ensure that code was valid.
Maybe this will change in the future, but it has to come from the top.
The thing that I found most amazing was that the IT people in charge of
the networks had the say over the people delivering the courses. It was
actually the network administrators that stymied the efforts of the
lecturers by denying access to better browsers and tools. You would
have thought that IT professionals would be far more aware of the
benefits of using compliant browsers and be implementing these in our
educational institutions.
Regards,
Ric
Michael Nelson wrote:
Ric Raftis wrote:
It was interesting reading your post James because it seems that
TAFEs across the country may vary widely despite courses
supposedly being drawn from a national based syllabus and
providing national accreditation.
Related to this, I reckon one of the biggest problems causing a lack
of standards in Web design education is a lack of collaboration. Each
facilitator/lecturor is re-inventing the wheel with activities and
resources largely due to IP restrictions within their workplace. In
reality, many facilitators just end up re-using the same resources
that's been used for the last 5 years because on their own they don't
have time to update both their own skills and the resources they use.
The ironic thing is that (nearly) all the best info on Web Design
topics is being shared freely by professional designers on their
blogs/sites! ... I mean, with excellent sites like
http://webdesignfromscratch.com/ and http://maxdesign.com.au/
published by professionals, what is the role of an educator?
My take is that if lecturors and facilitators were able to
collaboratively create and update flexible learning pathways from all
the great free stuff out there, we'd be in a better position to help
the uptake of standards in Web design education.
(Plug) : 'cause of this, I've started setting up a WebDesign Wikibook
over at:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Web_Design
<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Web_Design>
Really it's just ordering and grouping all the great resources out
there created by you professionals into some sort of learning pathway
with ideas for activities... Feel free to contribute :)
--
Michael Nelson
http://liveandletlearn.net/
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