W3C Open Web Education Alliance
The W3C Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group has the mission to standardise and foster high quality best practice education. Their focus is on fostering open communication channels and curriculum sharing between institutions, professionals and students.
Of all the initiatives coming out of the W3C at the present time this incubator group is one of the most critical to achieving a standardised industry. With standardisation comes the ability to hire someone who has a qualification you can have confidence meets your needs. With standardisation we all receive a wider reach of web standards best practices through the industry which makes our lives a whole lot better, and with improved knowledge and practices entering the field we are going to see higher quality work. Standardisation is critical to improving our ability to provide effective robust and interoperable software via the web without chasing our tails constantly to assert domination over the minions of chaos.
At present, when someone rocks into your offices and says they know a little about making websites you really don’t know at face value whether they’re full of crap or the hidden genius in their mother’s basement. Partly due to the fact most people have been self-training by necessity in this industry, and also because education curriculum issues have involved denial of best practice at worst and often misguidance of best practice at best.
Because when we’re training people to work as web professionals its important to open their eyes to web standards from the beginning. Its important to show the student not only how to get a website up and running but how to do that with industry best practices (rather than just saying it works and shrugging their shoulders). Every time someone is handed a web related qualification that they technically don’t deserve it fundamentally degrades the qualifications out there that are in the hands of students which were well deserved. The goal then is to foster communication and share best practices among education providers to improve that situation.
Further, from an industry perspective, we need to keep approaching education institutions and demanding these specific skillsets. Its not enough to say it should be a certain way anymore… if you’ve got time or an inclination, get involved.
