Special:Badtitle/NS104:DKS/Web technologies teaching

Back from another week of vaction. Yesterday I started teaching the (most introductory) web technologies class at Webster Geneva, where I teach 2-3 courses/year. Most students that did sign up already were familiar with half of the course level learning goals, e.g. basic HTML and CSS. To keep this course interesting I decided to redesign it. I started with "real world" web technology and that means creating websites with online services. Interestingly, most students (including our own at UniGE) are little familiar with such environments (except maybe a blogging service). Using these environments (e.g. Google sites, Netvibes, Ning, Blogger, etc.) I then can introduce other concepts (e.g. web applications and Internet protocols) and languages like HTML, CSS, RSS and some PHP. HTML can be introduced gently and easily with HTML widgets and through the web editors. Templating will be another big topic and I can use Google's Blogger for that. Finally I'll have them run a real webserver that is ultra portable (using MoWes) and have them install and configure portalware.

This of course also raises the question whether I should redesign my STIC courses in our Master of Science in Learning and Teaching Technologies. I start believing that a whole-part approach for this kind of subject area is better and certainly more interesting for the students than a part-by-part approach (XML,HTML,CSS,PhP,MySQL etc.) and this is quite compatible with trendy ID models like 4C/ID.

By the end of september or maybe later there should be some usable web technology tutorials in this wiki.