Development context for Web Challenges



related: http://pad.p2pu.org/WebcraftDocsprintproposal

Hyperlink pages and Site Maps — Roleplaying and Storytelling: http://pad.p2pu.org/SoWChallengeCYOA

Hyperlink pages and Site Maps - 

Analysis
Learning Outcomes
At the end of Webmaking 101, learners will be able to:

• Produce well structured, semantically appropriate HTML pages that support media such as images and video.
• Link the HTML pages together in a meaningful structure.
• Develop CSS files to style the content of the HTML pages. 
• Make appropriate technical and stylistic design decisions. 
• Clearly describe and document their HTML and CSS files. 
• Transfer files on and off a server.
• Organise access to web hosting 
• Present their pages to be used as the first iteration of a long running portfolio project. 
• Identify the next steps they'll need to take to add dynamic content to their pages and introduce CMS capability.

Producing basic web pages  should be framed in a broader context. eg. You'll use your html pages to provide the structure for a CMS Template eg. Wordpress. You'll reuse and refine your CSS files to update the styles of your site.

Learning Context
The School of Webcraft is a free, online web development community hosted within P2PU.org, a general peer learning community. Learners self-organise study groups and courses.  Learners discuss their work together using an asynchronous forum style interface and some also take the initiative to organise synchronous chat and meetings using tools such as IRC, Tokbox and etherpad.

School of Webcraft along with P2PU and Mozilla is exploring the Open Badges Framework, which will allow learners to earn badges which can be linked to online portfolios. 

Design Motivation
High quality, engaging and easily understandable learning  materials have been difficult to find for the purposes of this project as free and ideally openly licensed materials are required. Where up-to-date accessible materials exist they are written with a formal, academic audience in mind and haven't been popular with learners. 

The Web Challenge project requires engaging and clear tasks which reflect the best of open and standards based development practice.  The learning content should encourage social engagement, peer support and discussion with other learners, but the materials should be useful and engaging for learners working independently of a group.

The Web Challenge content should provide the necessary information and exercises to prepare learners for earning relevant badges. 


==== The Learners ====

General Demographics
School of Webcraft learners range in age from their late teens to their mid 60s. Predominantly male but there are many women present within the community. For the first iteration of the Webmaking 101 challenges it is safe to presume that most learners will be confident at speaking English and come from the US and UK. However, the audience is global and there is a strong South American (Spanish and Portuguese) and sub-continent audience who will participate using English as a second language.

Learner Motivation
While many of the project's audience are wanting to work as  professional web developers, a large part of the learners wish to incorporate web dev skills in their existing profession (eg. teachers, writers, designers).  At the earlier stages of web dev learning, eg. Webmaking 101 the audience is more general, reflecting both the professional and supplemental skill motivations. Webmaking 101 can be expected to attract more women and older learners than advanced topics in School of Webcraft. Maintaining a more equal audience beyond Webmaking 101 and into advanced technical topics would be a positive outcome.

Learner Technical Background
For a subject such as Webmaking 101 it is important to note that the technical confidence and skills of learners will vary and may be very limited. While it is safe to presume that most learners will have confidence with the web and social media such as Facebook, many people at this early stage will lack experience in general technical skills such as installing software and understanding file types. Webcraft learners predominantly use Microsoft based operating systems, with some Mac OSX and Linux used as well. 

Open and free culture background 
Some users may be aware of Creative Commons, FLOSS and the concept of open standards and free culture, however this shouldn't be assumed. In general P2PU attracts many learners aware of "open" and "free" and interested in learning in new ways, but the technical domain of School of Webcraft attracts people interested in learning web development specifically. This reduces learner's understanding of how P2PU "works" and it will be sensible to explain how peer-learning and open licensing will operate within the Webmaking 101 context.

Learning Styles
A large scale analysis of the learning styles of P2PU and more specifically SoW learners has not been made. However, given that there is much criticism of learning styles (Coffield, 2005) and the proposed audience is open and difficult to survey, it may be better to try and support multiple learning styles in Webmaking 101. In this respect the more traditional approach of Kolb or Honey and Mumford's could be considered, as Kolb's cycle flow of learning would support multiple learning styles. (http://www.businessballs.com/kolblearningstyles.htm)

Publication Method
In its initial iteration, learning content will be distributed as a series of "tasks" within the School of Webcraft subsite of P2PU.org. These tasks support embedded images and video as well as text. Preformatted text can be used to present code samples.

Localisation
The Web Challenge will be published under an open license which will allow for reuse, remixing and free distribution. There is an international, multi-lingual audience for School of Webcraft materials and all materials produced should be suitable for localisation.  Text, audio and video can all be localised relatively easily, however, text within images will be a challenge. Where possible, open format image files (eg. readable by commercial products and freesoftware such as GIMP or Inkscape) should be archived to allow text localisations. 

Maintaining Releases
The nature of web development requires that for materials to have a long life-time, they need to be updated to reflect contemporary technologies. While the initial version of these texts should be released as soon as possible as tasks within P2PU, a longer term distribution system should be considered. 

Until now, openly licensed courseware has not taken advantage of version control systems as a way of monitoring suggested changes, merging improvements and finalising an updated release. It is proposed that software development tools such as GIT be considered as a way of maintaining Web Challenge content for the longer term. 

The use of an version control tool will make it easier for quality to be maintained and will still allow improvements to be suggested. Understandably the localisation of text documents, subtitle files etc requires a different approach to the use of  language files. 







How to publish and release versions of the Web Challenges?


A CC license or similar gives freedom but makes it harder to import changes. A wiki is great but is ever changing. Something like GIT will let versions be released but allow for new changes to be pushed back in. I'd personally recommend hosting the original content in GIT. but how does a git server easily synch with the Lernanta software and feed back into tasks?


Note: these challenges are something that should be considered in a broader OER context
Sharing is good, but collaborative improvements are better, introducing the concept of a module owner / release process may further improve the quality fo content that is released.  How does this feed into delivering updated content to other services eg Connexions for the Dept of Labour project? 
Continually changing Wiki content is not going goto be suitable in this context, but moderated suggestions updated to  a regular release may be more suitable. IF we can think about how to solve this problem with this immediate Web Challenge project it will be of long term benefit outside of SoW too.





Audience:

• English language audience
• Inconsistency of background knowledge - we need a way of bringing all users up to speed - a pre-flight checklist so to say.

Primary audience: 
People wanting to become Web Developers. 
Secondary audience: 
Users may also be hobbyists, teachers, scientists etc who want web dev basics as part of a broader skillset. 


Social / Connections

• Are meetings between learners part of the proposed solution.
• Will there be facilitators (experienced or otherwise)
• Is connecting local groups together part of the goals?

PreFlight Checklist


Can this pre-flight checklist be framed within a task / series of tasks / lessons itself?


How the web works - client / server
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johndbritton/sets/72157624932677905/



eg. you need an Internet connection - you're reading this on the web - PASS
You need a web browser to interpret - get the latest version? - Share the version number and browser you're using
Why browser upgrades matter (web standards) or is this too early in the learning process?


   * An internet connection
   * A web browser to develop with + others to test on
   * Webhosting - note this introduces complexities in itself  - see discussion below- 
   * webhosting - what are the minimum requirements. it's all very well to say just get basic space able  to host PHP and HTML etc, but after webmaking hopefully developers are going to attempt using other frameworks that may require different settings
   * An imageeditor - recommending GIMP is all fine, but you still need to explain to users how to edit with GIMP  = what resource do you send them to? FLOSS Manuals?
   * Textbooks - MDN is ok - but for learners?
   * TEXT EDITOR - needs to have code formatting and highlighting. MUST BE FREE and Open Source - Ideally consistent across multiple platforms
   * General resource - HTML DOG?


Challenge: Best way to responsibly suggest Web Hosting for newbies

• recommending hosting space  is a little different to being able to suggest free software.  - usually a cost implied
• Harder to change once a commitment has been made
• 5 years ago finding free space wouldn't have been so hard (eg.  Geocities). But self publishing has been overtaken by hosted services  such as Wordpress and Tumblr. eg. People share their news with each other  using Facebook and Twitter, previously you HAD to self publish therefore more free sites. 
• At  what point can we (subtly) teach users that by producing their own  sites (not just their content) gives them much greater control over what  they do and share?
• How to teach server management best practice?
  •  - need to provide links (minimum) to managing your own hosted  server, security etc. This is a course within itself.

Elaborate as web hosting requirements - TASK - find a host that offers this stuff. Show a URL
Where do services such as HTMLPad fit into this learning experience?
At what point to wean them off this service and on to self hosting and control of their data?



Outcomes: 
Basic Portfolio site 
How can this basic page (a badge  requirement) be used as the basis for continuing work?  We should  ensure that any work we ask learners to do is somehow clearly reusable  or at least acts as a signal of progress.

• Not just for technology work - use it do display a sharable CV, to link to other work and interests you have online
• Must include links, multiple pages, shared CSS files (one for layout, one for text?) images.

   * Turn the page into a template for a CMS such as Wordpress? 
   * Reuse the basic CSS with this template




Where does basic design fit with basic web dev?


One of the challenges discussed with Jamie Curle is the idea of "recreate this page" 
Could we recommend a series of NICE mocked up page designs (as PDFs eg) that users can choose as their basic template. Each mockup could have an explanation of why it's good / who it's good for (this one is techy because it uses grey and black, this one is good for artists)




How do you users know what to do next? How do you scaffold their experience?
Can progression through tasks and further challenge series be phrased as a choose your own adventure / oreienteering adventure on the web?

What makes a good task:
1. Learn something useful
2. Create an artifact that you're not embarrased of
3. Looking at a collection of output of different people would be sufficiently different (creative) to be interesting.


Lernanta requirements for Tasks
What is the goal?
What do you need to know to start?
Required Reading / Watching?
How do you know when you've finished the task?
What do I do next?