Teaching web design online and student web sites
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Teaching web design online and student web sites

Portfolio.net websitesOne of the other things I do besides making websites is teaching other people how to make them. For the past three semesters, I have been adjunct faculty at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, teaching an online class called “portfolio.net”.

Teaching via bulletin board, instant messenger, screencast, and email can be a frustrating experience for all involved and requires a bit of dedication on the part of my students that might not need to be there if you were taking a class in person. A downside: it might take a few email exchanges to understand and explain a problem. An upside: You can “go to class” from anywhere, wearing pretty much anything. I usually graded student work from my favorite cafe. The person who used to teach this class lived in South Africa.

The main emphasis of the class is producing a web portfolio, which is the final project. But beyond just the portfolio, the class tries to teach some of the real mechanics of the web. Students learn HTML, CSS and get a little basic javascript. I am a firm believer in hand coding (as is any decent web designer), and tools like Dreamweaver or iWeb are not easy to teach over the internet. Plus, the web is a place of democracy, and using expensive tools to build code that is easier made with a free text editor doesn’t seem in the spirit of the web. By learning the basic building blocks, it’s my hope that students will be well prepared to actually maintain their sites down the road. While they might loose access to dreamweaver when they graduate or Adobe changes/discontinues it, the HTML of the site will look the same in any text editor.

Now that the semester is over, I thought I would share my student’s work and get them a little exposure and google-fu on the rest of the web. As you can see, my students are were mix of illustrators, photographers and fine artists:

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