« Thing is, it's *everyone's* library | Main | Tough call »
July 30, 2004
Final YA workshop
Last night was my last workshop at Watertown Free Public Library, teaching kids about the basics of web development, and at the same time a bit about layout and design.
Backup for Background: I was a web developer in a past life, which means that designers, who understood color, design, layout, composition, all that sort of professional designer stuff, gave me layered Photoshop files, and I basically built HTML code from the pretty pictures, and cut image files to plug in to the code. I, however, am not a pretty pictures gal (note the simple layout and design of my blog). I'm big on less is more, partly because my design kung fu is not pro, and partly because I only use design elements as appropriate.
However, understanding using the right tool for the job -- design element appropriateness -- is inextricably attached to learning good HTML and XHTML coding. Sure, you could have the craziest, most beautiful Escher drawing you've ever seen as a background image, because you can use an image as the background to your site, but it may not make the page very legible, and therefore pretty much unusable. So I had a lot of fun sneaking little bits of "just because you know how to do it doesn't mean it really *works*" into the workshop. And the coolest part is that the kids were getting it, telling me about examples of bad design they've seen on the web, asking me "how do they get like that" and how to avoid doing that themselves.
The other fun thing about last night was the style of the workshop. We only had two kids last night, and it was nice to be back in the tech lab style of teaching, where everything is based on what the students already know, really want to learn, and more individualized question answering. I had a rough lesson plan for each workshop, but with young adults, or with anyone for that matter, keeping it flexible when it comes to teaching hands-on tech really makes it easier and more fun. The best way of learning HTML in particular, I find, is learning by doing. One hour was not really enough time, but most of what we covered was very much the "try it and see what it does" approach, focusing on having the kids really think about the code, and what it does, and asking them questions that made them logically think about how to modify the code to do other things. Subversive training in critical thinking. It was quite spiffy.
Overall, I think we covered a lot more than blogs and web design in the classes I taught. The first blog workshop covered how to create a blog, but also how to keep your information private on the web, and the concept of current information as key to site freshness. We covered some search concepts, as well as the fact that blogs can be searched for information of interest, and how to use the free Bloglines aggregator to do both. Kids then applied some of the search skills in looking for images for their web sites in the third workshop on setting up a simple web site, and we covered a little copyright without sounding too boring. Last night was heavy hands-on with the code, but included many of these elements in the notion of planning before you build, finding the information you need, and knowing what to do with it on your site.
I love it when things converge so conveniently. In information, it often does. :)
July 30, 2004 6:26 AM