1 To tell you the truth

This argument is similar to the one that says that Microsoft needs to host their applications and offer them as SAAS… No they don’t, and no they didn’t miss the band-wagon either. It just wasn’t meant to be, and when it happens it’ll be a failure. Their time was a different time. Just like Yahoo and the new search game. It’s an uphill battle. Old schools of thought still have their place in the world, but their place is not in bleeding-edge industries. That’s where they lose their shirts. Blackberry spent their R&D dollars catering to the business people of the world, and if they don’t lose focus, they’ll still have a place there, but trying to compete with the iPhone will cause them to fail. What’s my point you ask?

Colleges were built hundreds of years ago to teach people about sciences that change over time, and history, literature, etc. They were never intended to keep up with technology that changes nearly every month. To think that you should have a college degree to do this stuff, or even to do C++ programming is ridiculous. Your education will be superfluous in an industry that turns direction faster than you can complete a semester. Get educated in why we won WWII, and why Winston Churchill was important, and Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and when you’re done… well then pick up a relatively new book, and get on a few blogs and start learning what you want to do. A girl I worked with told me she was planning on going to school to learn web design.

I told her that I made 100k and I had no training or school and I did web development. Instead of being inspired, she was depressed by it, and decided not to seek this as a career. My point in this example? You don’t get a free ride anymore just for sitting in a classroom.

posted at 12:22 pm on January 20, 2009 by Web Design

2 Looking for good Masters programs

I’m an undergraduate in Michigan that is graduating this year. I’m looking for some good graduate programs for web design/web authoring anywhere in the country. The ones in Atlanta and New York in this article are promising, but does anyone know of any others of quality?

posted at 03:10 pm on January 20, 2009 by Brad Bice

3 The way I see it

RE Brad , my old program director is talking about putting together a masters in web design at Empire State College in Saratoga Springs, NY. It took 6 years for his undergraduate program to get approved here in TN. I’m not sure if graduate programs or NY schools will make this one move any faster. :(

As for this article, I think all these resources are great, but I don’t expect them to make much of a difference. A lack of great material has not been the problem for at least 10 years now. The problems we face deal with the inability of higher ed to quickly and efficiently adapt to reality. I think this is a big problem and I think it hurts a lot of industries, not just ours. I both fear and hope that the current economic down turn provides the stimulus necessary to get institutions of higher learning working on this problem themselves.

This problem, or really this cluster of problems, may go deeper than we as a community can hope to dig.

But these materials will provide an excellent resource. A few forward thinking individuals will incorporate them into single courses, as much as their institutions will allow them. Fewer still may incorporate them into full fledged degree programs, and even when we’re lucky enough to see that happen, chances are that program is a change in leadership away from returning to the status quo. Most importantly, these materials will provide a great resource for the self motivated learner. But like I said, a lack of great material isn’t the issue. The self motivated have been doing fine with sites like ALA for quite some time now.

I think this movement has more potential to show the power of the creative commons and online community than it does to change higher ed. I think we could see the rise of digital apprenticeship to replace an educational infrastructure that simply cannot support the needs of our industry as it currently exists.

A student who spends 12 hours a week with materials such as these, and an additional 20 or so hours a week making an honest effort to put the ideas they contain into practice, would probably stand toe to toe with the vast majority of recent university grads after 4 years. They’d have better overall skills and less debt. For what this student isn’t paying in tuition, s/he could attend a conference or two every year and get hir network on. Some recent studies would seem to indicate that a large chunk of the value of a university degree comes from the social capital gained through the process. In other words, when it comes to predicting future personal and financial success, the networking and community built through the process of earning a degree can be just as important (possibly even more so) than anything actually learned. There are ways to tap into social capital while cutting out the middle man.

In addition to conferences, there’s the power of social networking. One of the biggest benefits to me as a university student was the cohort of fellow learners I could bounce ideas off of, share expertise with, and get constructive criticism from. But with a little initiative couldn’t we get that from a MeetUp.com group, a Ning group, or a FaceBook group? Recruiting learners with a serious outlook might be a problem. We are looking for constructive criticism after all. But I’m sure there are more than a few of us working professionals who’d be wiling to moderate such a group.

Ideally, a student would be able to build a portfolio and occasionally even collect a pay check from time to time throughout this process. I’d love to see a way to connect more budding web designers with local/small non-profits who could benefit from even a student’s work on their web presence. But even that could be as simple as helping both students and clients get more use out of resources like CraigsList and Guru.com.

I’m a staff member at a community college. I still have faith in the value of higher education. I have both a 2 year degree and a 4 year degree in web design. I’m currently working on a master’s degree . But I’ve grown tired of waiting for higher ed to catch up to my chosen industry. I honestly think we can do it better ourselves. We have the tools and we understand our own needs.

As unfair as it is, I think the best possible solution currently available for a student who is looking for a degree in web design but unable to find a program to their liking is to sign up for whatever degree program you think will get your foot in the door; graphic design, computer science, bakery sciences, whatever. Some degrees are obviously better than others but I think in today’s job market it’s better to have any degree, even a poor fit, than it is to have no degree. Then you’ll need to effectively double your work load as you use the wealth of material at your disposal to hone your true web design skills. That’s pretty much what Jina Bolton did while getting her graphic design degree at Memphis. She also chose a degree that would teach her principles that she could apply to her web work. Again, that’s extra work for you and it’s horribly unfair compared to someone who just wants to go into, say, Java programming with a comp sci degree.

If you are lucky enough to find a degree program that you think will work for you, then by all means go for it. I was very lucky in that regard but I can’t guarantee that program is still able to provide the same sort of experience I had now that we have a new director. But even as lucky as I’ve been in my education, I still think the years of self guided study I’ve put in thanks to resources like ALA are just as important to my current skill set.

posted at 04:06 pm on January 20, 2009 by Derek Pennycuff

5 Degrees and No Degrees

I’ve been developing and designing websites professionally since my senior year of high school in 2000. I do not have an undergraduate degree. Ironically, I’m working on a web team for a major university system in Texas on a site emphasizing that “higher education is for all of us”. After reading these articles, I’m left wondering “where does this leave me?” Do I have to put my career on hold, go back to school for 6 years learning about a field I’ve professionally practiced for 9 years if I want to teach what I know at the university level?

It seems that most of the people I have worked with also lack degrees. Maybe universities are too limited. Maybe we need to look for solutions in places other than the overly structured realm of higher ed. Is higher education failing web design and development because it belongs somewhere else? How many fresh graduates are really ready for the working world in other fields? When did college become trade school? Maybe this industry needs a kind of apprentice program to teach its successors instead of trying to shape universities to fill the needs.

posted at 06:02 pm on January 20, 2009 by mimi flynn

6 It does help

I have a comp sci degree, and it has helped me in every single way to understand the concepts that we use in Web Development. After all, it’s still development, meaning building systems. We should therefor structure these systems according to rules that were set in the 1970s. All these rules don’t change as much as the technology itself. When I was studying I learnt C, as I came out of school, Java was the hype. Still, I use what I learned about C (and programming in general) when I write JavaScript, when I structure HTML and CSS, and when I setup a new site. I find myself way more versatile then I would’ve been without the years in college. Still, I also feel focussing on such a small aspect of what I could do, the degree is overkill in a way. But, the web will still change, and more complexity will come in, up to a point where perhaps a simple self-study doesn’t prepare you enough for the real world anymore.

posted at 09:04 am on January 21, 2009 by Michiel van der Blonk

7 What is higher education for?

I would agree that a degree in web design is probably not appropriate – it’s too transitory a subject, and a degree needs to remain relevant. It’s also a very narrow field, and if you’re not careful is likely to leave graduates with limited employment prospects. A better subject might be Media & Communications, with a strong emphasis on the web design side. This would provide better links into neighbouring areas, and would better prepare students for life-after-college, as well as better equipping them for work in web design.

But the problem is more deep-rooted than that. Schools, colleges and universities often have classes and courses involving web design, even if that isn’t at their heart. And these are often (maybe even ‘usually’) taught extremely badly, because they are more concerned with getting something that looks funky done in a short space of time than they are with teaching web design properly. This is partly a result of the exigencies of the curriculum, but mostly because there is no-one who knows and can teach proper web design in the institution.

The problem is educating the educators, but until web design is seen as a serious job rather than as something that “anyone can do in Frontpage”, it is going to be a seriously uphill battle.

posted at 09:33 am on January 21, 2009 by Stephen Down

8 Not about you today, but about tomorrow ...

to @WebDesign and other nay sayers. Formal education is not about today or yesterday, but it is about tomorrow. There was a point that formal education couldn’t keep up with modern medicine, but they had to develop a whole new VERY different way of proceeding formally in order to maintain and sustain the needs of their profession. The same holds true for us.

Now to the piece. I like the general outline of the curriculum you suggest, it is very strong. I think what is missing though is the outside. That is a strong base in history and criticism and an understanding of cultural relevance to what we are doing.

The other part that is missing is the means of education. You don’t discuss whether this is going to be taught as a “design” education, or as a computer science or social science education. The 2 are very different and the ways they are taught will dramatically effect the types of roles and positions they are prepared for. I.e. design education is focused on studio. Not just “foundation” (awesome that you have that) but on studio, which is the environment and teaching style that foundation and other design courses are taught within.

It would seem to me b/c of the combination of design and teachnology that you are proposing (at least semantically) that we need to create a hybrid approach, but as I write this I’m challenging this.

What is the difference between code and plaster? Both are the means for enabling the vision of a designer to come to life. Also, as tools afford us more opacity to the technologies we are using, is “code” even relevant for the designer? Or are you educating designer, or the executioners of the designs of others.

Now this brings up the last question in my mind (I doubt it), should design and technology practice & education be mixed? With more and more to learn in our domain every day does it really make sense moving forward to sustain a professional environment where the practitioner needs to know everything from C++ to the typography? I’m not saying there won’t be people who DO just that, but is that a sustainable model for the profession.

Ok, that wasn’t my last point. What part of “standards” has to do with education of web design? I mean “web design” by itself is so limiting that I’m not even sure it is a valid degree. HTML, CSS, JavaScript are good technologies to learn, but I would never want to graduate an interactive design major/master without also knowing Java, Flash/ActionScrip/PHP, SQL, Blend/XAML, etc. The technology is not what we are designing, but rather the technology is what enables our designs. It should be elective to choose from a host of technologies instead of some arbitrary and only contemporarily (is that a word?) relevant technology such as Web Standards.

So while I agree w/ the message of we need to educate formally to sustain, I’m not so sure that the rallying cry of “Web” is useful to your market or to the long term sustainability you are trying to defend.

posted at 11:02 am on January 21, 2009 by Dave Malouf

9 Discourse!

RE Aarron – We’re turning the fruits of our own labor into the tools to be used by the next generation. ALA is a perfect example of this. And the people who have cut their teeth reading ALA are building Nings and Basecamps. Your argument seems to be saying such evolution isn’t possible without formal education in the field. But obviously it’s happening anyway. A student starting out today has a hell of a lot of tools I didn’t have 10 years ago, and I hope that means they can do even better than I have.

But I don’t think it’s all automatically better. Now students have so many resources they may face a serious information overload crisis. I also worry that the ability for anyone to start publishing a blog may make it easy to “fall in with a bad crowd”. You used to at least kinda know what you were doing to launch something like Zeldman.com. What if someone trying to learn on their own finds a bunch of blogs publishing “tutorials” worthy of the Daily WTF? But that’s where I think a new form of apprenticeship can come into play. If we know people are already trying to teach themselves in the absence of a reliable higher ed infrastructure, shouldn’t we do what we can to support that?

And I’m in no way arguing against trying to support the development of a sustainable higher ed infrastructure for this industry. I just don’t think we should focus exclusively on that. I for one don’t have a lot of hope to see any significant advances there for at least another generation. I think a lot of colleges and universities still miss the boat with their comp sci curricula, and that industry has a good half century lead.

RE mimi – Thank you! Years of over education have robbed me of my ability to speak/write/comment succinctly. You ask several important questions and I feel our minds are working in similar directions. :)

RE Stephen – My wife has a degree in “Media Arts” from the University of Tennessee. She’s had to put a lot of extra work into her chosen field to maintain her ability to compete in the market. So have most of the other people we know who graduated from her program. It seems such multi-disciplinary programs tend to teach you just enough about each field to leave you unhirable in all of them.

Still, your idea is probably more sustainable in the long run than a pure web design curriculum. And the best people in any field always have the initiative needed to make up for whatever the program lacks in the way of focus. That’s the theory that lead me to choose my graduate program.

posted at 11:09 am on January 21, 2009 by Derek Pennycuff

10 Going in the right direction

I have taught web design at the high school level for a few years now and am just beginning to teach at the community college level. I really appreciate what the folks on the WaSP task force, and all the others mentioned in the article are doing for the web design profession.

Web design and development will become more and more a part of formal education programs. What we see going on currently is the Information Architecture of webucation. Just like we need to think through the structure of a website, we need to think through the structure of web education.

If this is thoroughly though out, developed, and made readily available, it makes the next step a lot easier. The next step, as I see it is teaching according to these frameworks, adding working examples and testimonials, and really pushing school administrators/deans/department heads/etc to support these programs.

As a webucator, I feel I have a responsibility to help educate fellow web design teachers and program directors. But Aaron asks the same question they do, “What’s in it for them?” This is a question I hope to talk more about in the future…

As a side note, there is a really cool Doctoral and Masters program in Baltimore

In a final note, I agree that we should put an importance on IA in web education. Overall, we want students to have a big picture and conceptual understanding of design and development, not just technical skills.

Great job Aaron (and all else mentioned in his article), you are definitely moving my career of webucation in the right direction.

posted at 09:56 am on January 22, 2009 by Zac Gordon

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