Yes, I would love to be one of your students, if you would teach online. Brooklyn is a good choice, but if you teach online, you'll reach a larger audience.
Hey guys - thanks for all your support and comments. I would be happy to broadcast the class online, but would still like to have people actually there for it. I'll see if I can record it and post after, or stream live. Thanks for your suggestions, and shoot me an email if you want me to keep you updated!
Yes this is the one I'd probably recommend. They may already have an html5 course. There are also wiki sites like wikispaces.com or you can use wordpress.com or there are sites like instructables.com
For what it's worth, here's my course on web development: http://internetdev.usu.edu/notes We just cover the basics of HTML and CSS, and then jump into using a content management system (drupal). I hosted students' drupal sites myself, but there is also this free drupal hosting site: http://drupalgardens.com/ For the basic HTML/CSS part, I tried out http://kodingen.com/ to let students do everything in the browser since the computers are locked down here. It has some issues, but worked okay.
If it were me I would leave the teaching of Javascript and jQuery to later on after you've helped them build an application that works (i.e. after all the backend stuff is hooked up). I hope you find somewhere to get set up :)
It won't be anything too intense, just a couple of front-end tweaks to get peoples' feet wet and show them the power that jquery has. If all goes well, I could cover it more in depth in a later class.
Hey all - sorry about the font problems on Windows. This is just a one page site, and I'm using a font straight from the Google Web Fonts directory. I only have a mac at home, so that was how I tested it. I will certainly be more careful next time, and with a larger site would absolutely test on all browsers and operating systems.
The issue was caused by a webkit font rendering fix. Make sure to remove all text-stroke and text-shadow declarations for windows - these thin out the font and improve rendering in osx, but ruin it for windows (no surprise)
Man... fonts just look so shitty on windows overall. How can you handle this? Perhaps I'll change it to garamond though, it at least looks slightly better. Thanks for the suggestion!
Hahaha I'm sorry! If you do, it will be worth it, I promise. I'm certainly far from rich, and my mac laptop is dying and more than 4 years old, but I love it to death and continuously open it up, fix it, and replace parts whenever they go bad - it's a real trooper.
Also, you will be blown away by the software quality on macs... when I was growing up, all the 'good' software was for windows, but now the situation has completely reversed.
Stop hating; this class is for those who want to be web designers, and we all know that wannabe designers who are not yet using OSX are a lost case (at least hiring for a designer position someone who doesn't own a Mac is like UPS trying to fill a driver position with someone who has never had a driver's license).
Hang on, but isn't designing on a Mac the wrong way around? You get something that looks beautiful on a Mac, but dreadful elsewhere? Surely you design for, or at least prioritise, for the largest audience share? i.e IE or FF?
No, I'm not saying testing on computers other than Macs is wrong -- to the opposite, I think it must always be done (except maybe specifically in cases like this when you are looking for an audience of those who want to do design).
Design isn't about looking "beautiful". Design is (1) usability, (2) propaganda that relies on your audience's associative brain (peripheral cognition) to position the product into the realm of "desirable". Right now, in the minds of most people who matter, Apple designs are more desirable than air. So if the designer you're hiring hasn't figured that part out yet, his/her value to your company will be negative.
What's your audience? In my experience it's easy to teach someone how to build a simple website, but much harder to teach things like file-transferring, hosting, image formats, etc. However your topics seemed more-advanced than the basics, so I wonder who your students would be?
Completely agree. Way back in the day (late 90s) I decided to go hipster and hand-code my own static site in Notepad ("Suck it, Allaire HomeSite and HoTMeTaL!"), and put it up for all the world to see.
I didn't dig around too much into what would be needed - after all, I had taught myself HTML and relative paths! After a week of "Edit, Ctrl+S, Alt+Tab, F5, Repeat", I was finally happy with the (now shitty, then awesome) finished product. And then realised I had no clue how to get it up on any website, much less my own.
That was when I truly learnt how anything ought to be learnt (end-to-end). And also that I probably wasn't as smart as I thought :(
TL;DR: created website without knowing how websites really work.
Hey guys, like I mentioned in the summary of the class, I will be completely covering deployment, including how to upload and deploy a full site both in rails and for static files. Cheers!
There would be homework. But it won't take years - there are very quick and simple ways to deploy for both rails and static. It takes me no more than 30 minutes to get any website from dev to online. That's what the class is for though -- if you want to find out how, come ; )
I appreciate your idea and effort, but here's a bleak picture of how it could go.
1. week: everybody is into it. Some even have little background on the subject, some are complete newbies. You give little bit of homework.
2. week: you start really doing something. Some fall behind and didn't do their homework. Other's have progressed well, somebody is even arguing with you how it should be done.
3. week: class is divided. Some have really picked up the pace, some are following your plan and most of your time is taken up the struggling newbie.
etc.
All I'm saying here is, that if you go ahead with then you can help many but you'll need to be prepared. People learn complex stuff at a different pace. From what I've seen, teaching and computers don't go very well together. Workshops are bit better. Give people resources to learn from and those are interested will learn.
You can say this about any class. I know everyone learns at a different pace, this is just a truth of life. This is not going to be a small class that involves tons of personal attention lavished on everyone - this is going to be an overview class. If someone is struggling and wants extra personal tutoring, they can hire me for that separately, but I'm going to generally keep it moving.
If someone comes to the class that is not interested, they will be left behind - that's just how it is. Remember, this is a free class - nobody is paying me for this, so there's no complaining. If someone is interested, they will learn. If not, they will drop.
The homework will be very little, and will be mostly based on projects. Each person will have an individual project they are working on - if they choose something they are excited about, hopefully this will keep them going.
There are plenty of co-working spaces in NYC, I'm sure if you get in touch the would be thrilled to lend you a teaching space in exchange for easy access to the course.
Its awesome that you would take the time out to set up some free classes but I think you would need to move some things around in this syllabus.
Basics of Graphic Design - Great starting point. No arguments here.
Learning HTML (html5) only - I dont agree with this. HTML5 is not that widely adopted yet to be a sole basis of HTML learning. It often still requires JS just to make it render correctly across all browsers. Using the HTML5 doctype and teaching HTML5 as what-is-to-come is great, but it shouldnt be the basis. Especially if you are looking to teach cross-browser compatibility and best practices.
Javascript/JQuery - Sounds about right.
Databases / MVC / RoR - This is where you kind of blur the line between teaching "Web Design" and "Web Development". This should be an optional split. If you want to continue learning the development side you go this route, if they want to stay design side, go a different route. There is really no reason for a designer to know about how MVC works.
Deployment - The basics of deployment would be great for everyone but advanced RoR, Django style deployments shouldnt be apart of a normal course.
Thanks for your intelligent and thoughtful review. To respond:
I am going to stick with html5. I personally support progressiveness in design, and that means if someone is using IE6 and/or no javascript, I do not support this (and neither does google, wordpress, and a host of other large companies). As long as you have javascript turned on, the simple inclusion of modernizr makes html5 100% functional. I think it would be a best practices fail NOT to teach html5. I always have coded in html5, and so has the web agency I work at, and anyone else I know in web dev.
On the dev, you're totally right, but I disagree with the statement "There is really no reason for a designer to know about how MVC works". The more a designer knows about development, the better they will be to work with. I don't think there should be a split between design and development, it's good to dabble in both. Of course, everything is optional - if someone was very stubborn about not knowing anything about dev, they could skip the class.
I will be covering quick basic RoR deployment through Heroku, not advanced rails deploys. That would be for a later course ; )
"Progressiveness in design" only works when people are actually able to view it correctly. Given the fluctuating state of HTML5 at present, I'm reasonably sure you're just introducing additional complexity and points of failure unless you are teaching exhaustively only the exact features that work correctly, everywhere. This is not a particularly large set.
Now, I'd say something very different if HTML5 actually worked correctly everywhere, or even most places. But here's the thing--indoctrinating people into a JavaScript dependency like modernizr to fuel your desire to use a standard that isn't completely implemented anywhere is, frankly, terrible: a much more important lesson to drive home is "look, use progressive enhancement," not "look, HTML5 is awesome!", and making modernizr a dependency is the exact opposite of smart. Yes, your "web agency" might do this--but that doesn't make them very bright, either.
It's rule #1 of responsive web design: start with the simplest base case, and progressively enhance from there. If you want to really teach people how to benefit themselves by being able to write this stuff, I'd strongly recommend starting there--not with the high-end "look at my buzzwords and adopt them." Simple is good--really.
I still could not disagree more strongly. We're producing sites and apps for some of the biggest companies out there in html5. No joke, google.com, yahoo.com, and facebook.com (those were the first and only 3 I checked) are coded in html5. You are just behind the times... sorry! html5 is where it's at, and if you haven't adopted it yet, you are disagreeing with all of the top web coders in the industry. Start checking the doctypes and get with the program : )
I agree that simple is good, but you are just wrong on the html5... sorry : /
I am well with the program--I'm not the one advocating the use of modernizr or other hacks instead of building HTML that actually works on its own merits. The "HTML5" used by Facebook et al. is a very, very limited subset. The overwhelming majority of their work is valid HTML4! Your argument to authority is foolish.
HTML5 is a perfectly good tool, but relying on it and a JavaScript library to smooth it over because it doesn't fully exist yet is crazy. If you are not writing a web application--an application, not a "website"--and it breaks because someone has JavaScript off, you screwed up. I know that's a foreign concept to somebody inculcated into the bizarre little world of Ruby, but you're throwing simplicity out for buzzwords.
For better or for worse (and believe me, I am strongly of the opinion that it is worse), IE is not dead. These people you presume to teach are not 'opinionated' towards whether people using IE et al. should be marginalized and made second-class citizens. You, however, presume to make a decision for them that they have to make for themselves. And that's not right.
It's what happens with any teacher you get. Everyone has a way that they do things and their own opinions, and my opinion is use html5, always. Just so happens that this is also the opinion of the majority of web devs.
To be fair, you are right though - I should at very least educate people about this before teaching it. I will make sure to let my students know that if they would like to decrease the quality of their products based on 2% of people (that's data from 2007 as well, likely has gone significantly down) who browse with javascript off, then they should not use any html5 tags. Fair enough?
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadI'm from Europe, but I'd love it if you could stream these sessions too.
Maybe look into streaming via justin.tv or something ?
VOD's would be pretty sweet as well.
For what it's worth, here's my course on web development: http://internetdev.usu.edu/notes We just cover the basics of HTML and CSS, and then jump into using a content management system (drupal). I hosted students' drupal sites myself, but there is also this free drupal hosting site: http://drupalgardens.com/ For the basic HTML/CSS part, I tried out http://kodingen.com/ to let students do everything in the browser since the computers are locked down here. It has some issues, but worked okay.
like using fonts that look rubbish on anything but OSX?
Garamond 17px: http://i.imgur.com/ajLUj.png
Also, you will be blown away by the software quality on macs... when I was growing up, all the 'good' software was for windows, but now the situation has completely reversed.
Design isn't about looking "beautiful". Design is (1) usability, (2) propaganda that relies on your audience's associative brain (peripheral cognition) to position the product into the realm of "desirable". Right now, in the minds of most people who matter, Apple designs are more desirable than air. So if the designer you're hiring hasn't figured that part out yet, his/her value to your company will be negative.
I didn't dig around too much into what would be needed - after all, I had taught myself HTML and relative paths! After a week of "Edit, Ctrl+S, Alt+Tab, F5, Repeat", I was finally happy with the (now shitty, then awesome) finished product. And then realised I had no clue how to get it up on any website, much less my own.
That was when I truly learnt how anything ought to be learnt (end-to-end). And also that I probably wasn't as smart as I thought :(
TL;DR: created website without knowing how websites really work.
1. week: everybody is into it. Some even have little background on the subject, some are complete newbies. You give little bit of homework.
2. week: you start really doing something. Some fall behind and didn't do their homework. Other's have progressed well, somebody is even arguing with you how it should be done.
3. week: class is divided. Some have really picked up the pace, some are following your plan and most of your time is taken up the struggling newbie.
etc.
All I'm saying here is, that if you go ahead with then you can help many but you'll need to be prepared. People learn complex stuff at a different pace. From what I've seen, teaching and computers don't go very well together. Workshops are bit better. Give people resources to learn from and those are interested will learn.
If someone comes to the class that is not interested, they will be left behind - that's just how it is. Remember, this is a free class - nobody is paying me for this, so there's no complaining. If someone is interested, they will learn. If not, they will drop.
The homework will be very little, and will be mostly based on projects. Each person will have an individual project they are working on - if they choose something they are excited about, hopefully this will keep them going.
http://wiki.coworking.info/w/page/16583629/CoworkingNewYorkC...
http://www.wixlounge.com/ http://blog.wix.com/2011/06/the-wix-lounge-nycs-hot-spot-for...
Basics of Graphic Design - Great starting point. No arguments here.
Learning HTML (html5) only - I dont agree with this. HTML5 is not that widely adopted yet to be a sole basis of HTML learning. It often still requires JS just to make it render correctly across all browsers. Using the HTML5 doctype and teaching HTML5 as what-is-to-come is great, but it shouldnt be the basis. Especially if you are looking to teach cross-browser compatibility and best practices.
Javascript/JQuery - Sounds about right.
Databases / MVC / RoR - This is where you kind of blur the line between teaching "Web Design" and "Web Development". This should be an optional split. If you want to continue learning the development side you go this route, if they want to stay design side, go a different route. There is really no reason for a designer to know about how MVC works.
Deployment - The basics of deployment would be great for everyone but advanced RoR, Django style deployments shouldnt be apart of a normal course.
I am going to stick with html5. I personally support progressiveness in design, and that means if someone is using IE6 and/or no javascript, I do not support this (and neither does google, wordpress, and a host of other large companies). As long as you have javascript turned on, the simple inclusion of modernizr makes html5 100% functional. I think it would be a best practices fail NOT to teach html5. I always have coded in html5, and so has the web agency I work at, and anyone else I know in web dev.
On the dev, you're totally right, but I disagree with the statement "There is really no reason for a designer to know about how MVC works". The more a designer knows about development, the better they will be to work with. I don't think there should be a split between design and development, it's good to dabble in both. Of course, everything is optional - if someone was very stubborn about not knowing anything about dev, they could skip the class.
I will be covering quick basic RoR deployment through Heroku, not advanced rails deploys. That would be for a later course ; )
Now, I'd say something very different if HTML5 actually worked correctly everywhere, or even most places. But here's the thing--indoctrinating people into a JavaScript dependency like modernizr to fuel your desire to use a standard that isn't completely implemented anywhere is, frankly, terrible: a much more important lesson to drive home is "look, use progressive enhancement," not "look, HTML5 is awesome!", and making modernizr a dependency is the exact opposite of smart. Yes, your "web agency" might do this--but that doesn't make them very bright, either.
It's rule #1 of responsive web design: start with the simplest base case, and progressively enhance from there. If you want to really teach people how to benefit themselves by being able to write this stuff, I'd strongly recommend starting there--not with the high-end "look at my buzzwords and adopt them." Simple is good--really.
I agree that simple is good, but you are just wrong on the html5... sorry : /
HTML5 is a perfectly good tool, but relying on it and a JavaScript library to smooth it over because it doesn't fully exist yet is crazy. If you are not writing a web application--an application, not a "website"--and it breaks because someone has JavaScript off, you screwed up. I know that's a foreign concept to somebody inculcated into the bizarre little world of Ruby, but you're throwing simplicity out for buzzwords.
For better or for worse (and believe me, I am strongly of the opinion that it is worse), IE is not dead. These people you presume to teach are not 'opinionated' towards whether people using IE et al. should be marginalized and made second-class citizens. You, however, presume to make a decision for them that they have to make for themselves. And that's not right.
To be fair, you are right though - I should at very least educate people about this before teaching it. I will make sure to let my students know that if they would like to decrease the quality of their products based on 2% of people (that's data from 2007 as well, likely has gone significantly down) who browse with javascript off, then they should not use any html5 tags. Fair enough?