texo textura

The secret origins of texo textura

Every superhero needs a secret origin. It is in the manual. Our hero texo textura got its start in a humble community college where a lowly assistant instructor took it upon himself to develop a Web design and programming curriculum for the school.

As he leapt into this task he found an unexpected, dark underbelly to his quest. The academic resources available to aid him in his quest, simply put, sucked. Though there were many noble and worthy texts out there for those learned scholars who just needed to jog their memory on some small point of order or another, the texts for the novices were filled with wild inaccuracies, misrepresentations, errors, and quaint (in the sense of hideously outdated) notions.

In other words, texts were either above the students heads, or not worth the paper they were printed on. The few truly worthy texts were often by small pubishers, who invariably folded under the weight of well-marketed dreck from the major publishing houses.

Therefore, the assistant instructor took it upon himself to document all his lectures and to get them online as he could in order to provide a valid and accurate source of information on Web design.

Now, I don't know if anyone remembers the scene in the Phantom Tollbooth where an evil character tries to get our hero to waste the rest of his days moving sand from one pile to another with a pair of tweezers, but ...

About the same time that the assistant instructor acquired tenure and could now attach the word "professor" to his name, he realized that such a documentation project was beyond him. Not in the technical sense, but in the physical sense. With constant updates to meet new standards, finding better ways to say things, and his own professed interest in the more theory laden side of the picture, he found it hard to move forward on this documentation project. It became a bit of an albatross.

So he decided it was time to seek help. It was time to form a community of scholars to talk about effecting learning and instruction in Web programming and design. And it was time to work towards achieving a critical mass that would force the hands of publishers to ensure that their Web design and programming texts were technically and pedagogically sound. In other words it was time to push for change.

Not revolutionary change, but just simple advancement. Change toward teaching students to be on the same page as such major players as CNN and ESPN, both of which make extensive use of easy to learn and easy to apply concepts and best practices that most textbooks and presumably most Web programming and design courses never even touch upon. Change that is about teaching best practices to our students. Not what we are comfortable teaching, because it is what we learned, but what students need to learn to succeed tomorrow.

Education students is not about yesterday's ideas, or even today's, it is about the ideas of tomorrow, and preparing students to be ready for them. A good instructir is never delimited by what they have learned in school, because everything they do should be an ongoing process of moving past what they themselves learning and always trying to do better by pushing boundaries and moving forward into unknown territory. To date in Web design, we have been failing our students on this front. This must change.

Okay, that is mostly overdramatized rhetoric, but the points made are important. Simply put, working in a vacuum is not productive, at least not nearly so much as it could be. The point of texo textura is to create a collaborative environment for discussing the teaching of Web design.

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The secret origins of texo textura