Is this a call for younger professor’s and lecturers in the design industry related university courses? Probably.

Change is constant when it comes to multimedia, computing and the internet.

I honestly can say I wish I had done Visual communication as opposed to IMD because then I would have lecturers like Chris & Nik for all my modules.

Before I started IMD I already had a keen grasp for design, html, css and the programs behind them.
Chris and Nik have taught valuable thought proccesses and inspired me a lot. If I was doing visual communication instead of IMD, I would have had a lot more potential for learning in an enviornment with lecturers like Chris & Nik for every module rather than just 1.

Apart from my design modules, have I learnt anything useful that will help me in industry?

The short answer to that is NO.

What use is knowing a small portion of visual basic to me? None whatsover.
What use is knowing macromedia director? Well maybe because it’s a very small bit like flash it will help me with flash, but I could have just done a full module on flash and had something useful to come out of university with.

It really is a shame that the bulk of our course is poorly put together. It is aimed at making us a hybrid designer & developer, but we all know that in the industry, you are one or the other, and if you are both, you are weighted to one side of the scale.

I regret paying thousands of pounds out to attend IMD when the bulk of it apart from the design modules are useless to me. And if anyone else is creative and asking me about IMD because they want to become a designer, I tell the truth and point them towards visual communication.

I completely understood where you were driving with this. Sadly, en masse, I think there’s a near direct correlation between age and reluctance to change. In my experience, I know of few older university staff willing or able to keep pace with change in what is a rapidly changing industry (see Pete’s comments above).

However, this isn’t to say that these staff don’t exist. They are there and, in my opinion, should be embraced and championed (sadly university’s are often fraught with politics and this doesn’t always happen).

Also, regarding the second part of that comment, “I just wanted to create that mental image of the stereotypical stuffy professor in his tweed jacket smoking a pipe.”

As chance would have it Nicklas and I are tweed jacket wearing (and occasional pipe smoking) lecturers! (Sorry!) I’d like to think we’re not stuffy, however, and we’re certainly not on professors’ salaries (though if our students care to make a concerted case to lobby on our behalf for a promotion we won’t stop them).

Erik, with regards to your comment about “the natural behavior of naked HTML elements”, we absolutely agree. We specifically cover unstyled HTML at length as part of our teaching process and encourage our students to see well-structured, semantic markup – unstyled – as a significant part of the design process.

In our friends of ED book, we cover HTML at great length, encouraging readers to understand how HTML elements display unstyled and only once that’s comprehensively understood move on to introduce CSS. Your point about the cascade and specificity is also something we cover at length, tying CSS to document structure and minimising CSS where possible.

As for the question, “Is Belfast really turning into a standardista paradise?” We’re working on it!

It also makes it exponentially easier to diagnose and deal with issues in layout or behavior and modifications are a cinch when you’re keeping everything separated.

An additional selling point for me is how truly horrifying it is to try and walk the node tree of a 3 table-deep layout with DOM scripting when the original developer of the code couldn’t be bothered to validate or he might have noticed that he wasn’t closing his tags properly. If tags mostly represent content, creating dynamic interaction with sites becomes much easier to do.

One useful approach I think people are missing on CSS is to get more into the nitty-gritty of how it is that the HTML lays out by default. I was first taught by a table guy who didn’t really like all this weird “new stuff” and his methods made such heavy use of attributes that it took me a while to grasp what the natural behavior of naked HTML elements was during the unlearning phase. The conclusion I’ve come to on my own is that the best way to handle things is to let the HTML do as much of the work as possible and then use the CSS to do the rest. Top down / left to right ordering of your elements is a nice side effect and I find that it tends to make layout tweaks go a lot more easily.

Too many devs have the instinct that it’s going to be easier on them if they completely override the default HTML positioning and sizing behavior and ratchet and nail everything down to avoid cross-browser issues when they’re really more likely just causing unnecessary problems and making their stuff much more difficult change which is missing the point.

I’ve run into a similar type of thinking in abuse of the cascade to over-specify the individual properties of every single unique element on the page for an intranet. That code was a nightmare to fix and they wouldn’t just let me redo it. There must have been 700 declarations with an average of a dozen properties set for each. And the guy still clearly didn’t fully comprehend how specificity rules worked. The pages had some rails stuff going on but they weren’t that complicated. There was a logo. Background was white. It was primarily a 3-color scheme. 700+ declarations.

I second those Friends of Ed books, but it was Jeremy Keith’s DOM Scripting that really got me hooked on standards and basically set the foundation for the mushroom-clouding of my skills that’s resulted in the wide range of possibilities my knowledge allows today. Although maybe the timing was just perfect for me because I knew the syntax of all three languages but was still fumbling with the application of them.

CSS Mastery is a fantastic book for getting over a lot of the common stumbling blocks though and I credit it with another major upgrade to my skillset. I’ve also recently gotten some use out of Eric Meyer’s CSS pocket guide from O’Reilly. It’s hard to find concisely written details on how things are supposed to be rendered by the browsers.

Is Belfast really turning into a standardista paradise? That sounds appealing. Maybe I’ll stop by on my way to Brighton to see if Clear Left needs people to cover the web development slack while they make all the real money on speaking engagements. :)

What you said was completely accurate, it’s attitude. A lot of people in academics simply refuse to change either out of arrogance (“I know better, I’m a college professor”), reluctance to learn something new, politics (“we’re funded by XYZ and they use .NET”), or a combination of all.

That’s why I feel that the Web Standardistas are refreshing and revolutionizing the way we normally think of conventional design/development curriculum currently available in universities and colleges.

And Christopher, you’re exactly right – our industry is still pretty young, it changes constantly. I think that the curriculum should be reviewed at least once a year to ensure that what’s being taught is up to date. That’s the nature of the beast and, like you said, there’s really no changing that.

I want to see less students being taught table-based layouts (unless it’s for discussion sake or presenting a counter-argument to modern layout standards, like: “Table Layouts vs. Div Layouts: From Hell to… Hell?“), marking up a page in <ALL CAPS>, or getting taught an obscure programming language that was picked for no particular reason other than it’s what the professor is most comfortable with.

If you’ve ever worked with new developers, you’ll quickly see that you need to provide a lot training for them to unlearn a lot of BS they were taught. I’m of the opinion that universities should be preparing their students well, especially in this competitive work environment.

My two cents.

Matt, in principle you’re right, and I agree with you, with, however, a few qualifications…

As university lecturers, we’re frequently asked by industry partners to teach very specific skill sets, for example, “We’re currently using Dreamweaver,” or, “jQuery is the JavaScript framework we’re currently using.”

Whilst we can appreciate that this is what industry might need at this particular moment in time, it’s a huge mistake to think that solely delivering what industry needs at this particular moment in time is what a university’s purpose is.

A university’s role is to teach core principles and, more importantly, to equip students with an ability to think, to challenge and to question. Universities are intended to prepare students for life, not just to prepare students for what is current, right now.

However, I believe that the field we’re teaching – broadly web design and web development – is fundamentally different to many other specialisms taught at university. Our field, unlike, for example, English Literature or Classics, is characterised by rapid evolution and change. This inevitably requires us to cover what’s current. This is why we state above, “We believe in teaching by example, tying principles and theory into contemporary best practice.”

Our field is evolving at an unprecedented pace and, in this regard, it departs from some of the norms that usually characterise the university system.

Pete, I can wholeheartedly understand the frustration you might feel being taught software that is, in some cases over half a decade old. In our industry half a decade is an eternity.

So why does this happen? Why are current students taught software that is outdated and – even in principle – no longer relevant?

I believe Jacob touches on the heart of the problem when he refers to the 55 year old professor who refuses to let go. As an educator I’m sure I’m not alone in recognising this. However, this isn’t a question of age, it’s a question of attitude. Contrary to popular opinion, there are older and experienced lecturers who teach contemporary practice, unfortunately they are often – in this specific field – in the minority.

I believe, as we state above and as Jacob states, our role as lecturers is not only promote web standards and core principles, but to evolve our delivery and our curriculum as our industry changes – to keep pace with current standards. That might mean re-writing our learning outcomes and lecture content on a yearly basis, but – in this industry – I believe there is no alternative.

It’s the same with web standards: I think it’s the university’s job to not only promote web standards, but to change the curriculum as things change. Teach updated information, teach the right way of doing things, instead of ingraining outdated, useless information upon students and making them think it’s alright and that that’s the way to do things when they get out of college.

What Chris and Nicklas are doing is amazing for our industry: they’re cranking out a highly-skilled, highly-knowledgeable individuals that I would hire in a heartbeat.