Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

The venerable “A List Apart” today publishes two articles on the state of education for web professionals, the first by Leslie Jensen-Inman, whose recently finished a Master’s thesis, where she

interviewed thirty-two web design and development leaders. Each of them expressed interest in the formal education of the next generation of web professionals. Most emphasized a challenge common to higher education: technology moves too fast for curriculum to keep up with it.

Leslie’s article summarizes those responses, and looks at the issues associated with, and some strategies for improving the education of web professionals.

In a related article, Aarron Walter surveys various projects related to education of web professionals, including the Web Standards Project’s Curriculum Framework, Opera Software’s Open Curriculum Project, the work being done by the Information Architecture Institute, and our own project “Ed Directions” – a one day symposium style workshop, bringing together domain experts, education experts (including Aarron and Leslie), and educators, to help improve the quality of education for “the next generation of web professionals”. Our first run of Ed Directions is taking place in Denver on February 3rd, as part of Web Directions North, and we hope to hold similar events in association with other Web Directions Conferences.

In fact, Ed Directions brings together not just Aaron and Leslie, but also Chris Mills who manages Opera’s open curriculum project, Stephanie Troeth, who along with Aaron and others at WaSP is coordinating their Curriculum Framework Project, Nick Fogler from Yahoo!, who has been developing and implementing their internal
front end engineering training project, as well as folks like Jeffrey Brown and Glenda Sims who’ve been involved with developing and implementing standards and best practice focussed programs at secondary and post secondary level.

This is something we’ve ben passionate about and focussed on for a long time with Web Directions and westciv, and it’s very encouraging to see so much activity in this area.