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What is texo textura?
[what]
[why]
[who]
[secret origins]
The Grief Sessions
[explanation]
[myths]
[bad habits]
[obstacles]
[home]
What is texo textura?
[what]
[why]
[who]
[secret origins]
The Grief Sessions
[explanation]
[myths]
[bad habits]
[obstacles]
We all need a place to vent.
The Grief Session are a culture jam of bitching and moaning about the current state of things. An interlude of complaint and recrimination. In other words, the perceived problems that fuel texo textura. The things that this site is meant to improve and to make better.
Or perhaps you can think of them as a therapy session, where we get to vent our frustrations by complaining about our dysfunctional behavior in others. By documenting them here, coworkers no longer have to listen to our complaints. They now can read about them too.
Send in your complaints and the best ones will be added to the list. So people can discover they are not the only ones facing that particular problem.
In any event, this section covers the road blocks we face in crafting effective Web programming and design programs.
There are three sessions to bend your ear (or eyes) to:
The myths are reasons given for poor Web design programs, for resistance to change toward better programs, and to generally dismiss efforts. Some have been explicity stated. Some have been clearly implied. They are the ways in which people put down Web programming and design programs.
They are myths not because they are wrong, or fantastical, but because they are valid points. However, most of them are valid assertions in other contexts, and some are active misapplications of rules to avoid thinking about the issue. There is still something to be learned from myths, but they must be taken with a grain of salt.
Bad habits are the habits that people have fallen in to that hinder progress in advancing the task of teaching Web design. They are ways in which people teaching Web design obstruct their own advancement toward better pedagogy.
Bad habits are easy to fall into, and with a little effort, easy to break out of. Bad habits are why we enforce structured programming and object-oriented programming from day one in other programming fields. Although it is easy to break a bad habit, it is hard to unlearn it, because one first has to see that it is wrong, then the value of correcting it before change can be effected.
We no more want to teach our students bad habits in Web design than we want to teach them that unstructured code and an over-reliance on goto statements are a good thing. So then, why do we?
Obstacles are the roadblacks in the way of effective Web pedagogy. These range from buzzword fixation in industry to textbook models that hold new editions as a higher good than accuracy.
Obstacles are perhaps the greatest roadblock since they are not things we can correct by mending our ways. Rather we need to correct them by mending the ways of others. This means convincing textbook publishers, adminstrators, and industry pundits that our solutions are the right ones.
It does seem that the industry pundits are more on the ball than other potential naysayers. Certainly CNN and ESPN are more on the ball than any textbook publisher or academic software provider out there (perhaps it is once again the jocks getting the best stuff?). But the academy should be leading industry not following it. We should be teaching students what they will need to know tomorrow, not yesterday.