2011 Web Design Survey Sneak Peek & Winner!

My education isn’t very relevant to web development/web design. As far back as my senior years in high school (3-4 years ago), the stuff they taught us was non-standards based table layouts. A lot of the solid stuff in that area is found on the web or in some books; I have no idea of anywhere in Brisbane (capital of QLD, a state of Australia) that they teach standards based web design, progressive enhancement/graceful degradation, etc.

There are two ways to learn from the web design

1. Self taught + online resources like nettuts+, google, etc. as long as it belongs to the field you like.
2. Get a college degree

but for me i’ve prefer to self taught … I can review it as many times as I like…

I think that a college degree is not necessarily the most important thing, But as a computer science student, understanding how an interpreted language is run, how memory is allocated, and how the internals of the web work at a base level provide a solid background upon which build presentable websites for consumption. At the end of the day, You can learn a lot of practical applications from tutorials, more than enough for a career, but I have yet to find a solid resource online that teaches the theory of what a web design / web programming with the depth of a degree (ie. formal methods for software analysis etc.)

Let;s add some perspective to this discussion.

I am a teacher. My official title is Professor, Interactive Multimedia at a college in Toronto. Have been for over a decade.I look at writing 14 books about these technologies, the few dozen tutorials I have written here and the few thousand elsewhere along with the Training DVD’s I have produced and the regular Conference speaking engagements and University lecture tours as being nothing more than extensions of my being a teacher.

I am used to being dumped on and have received the usual “Those that can… do and those that can’t … teach” stuff for years. I just let it slide because I really don’t have time for “sweeping generalizations and pronouncements” from self-appointed opinion makers.

Is an education valuable? Absolutely. The fancy paper with the big gold seal is interesting but I don’t know of any student or graduate who was instantly hired on that basis. The reality is, as one employer told me, “I am going to look at a portfolio looking for critical thinking and creativity. I ,frankly, get tired of looking at portfolios that are nothing more than tweaked versions of Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials.”

In many respects what the students learns is more valuable than where the student learns it. That is a key issue confronting today’s educators. This silly business has only one constant: Change”. This presents educators with two choices: Adapt or Ignore.At my College, we adapt by looking ahead at Emerging Tech and asking a simple question: “Is this going to impact our students when they graduate?” If the answer is “Yes” our next question is critical: “What do they need to know?. This is a ton of work because our courses change from semester-to-semester yet we have become so used to it that we regard it as a part of the job. The end result is one of the highest graduate employment rates for a program of our type in Canada and elsewhere based on Government statistics.

Even then, that is half the story. The other half lies with the student. If he or she flames out after graduation this is not my problem so don’t blame me or my peers. I make it very clear to our 1st year students that I am not there to teach them how to use software. I am there to beat into them the simple fact that this program is the start of a lifelong passion for learning thanks to “Change”. If they are not prepared to commit to that then I point to the door and tell them: “Leave the room. Go get a refund and go drive a beer truck.”

As for the tutorial sites, like teachers and institutions, there are good ones and bad ones.The good ones answer the “Why am I …” questions and give you a broader view of the task or concept at hand. The OK ones are like staring down a pipe by giving you a narrow view of the task or concept at hand.

Finally, I dealt with this three years ago and the issues- particularly skills segmentation- I identified still percolate through education. You might be interested in giving it a look: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/education_of_freaks_and_geeks/

Cheers!

Congratulations to Michael Freytag! I totally agree with him!

For me, college degree for web design is somehow irrelevant, I’m completely self taught (thanks to the global web community). The only problem I had with my college degree was when I tried to apply for some big Companies here as they wanted the minimum academic qualification to be bachelors (that too was irrelevant though).

I had wished to join college for Web design studies but unfortunately not a single college or University in my country have a specific web course and going through my self studies on the web and other articles like these, I’ve concluded one thing, College degree matters but not as much as I had believed it would be.