10 March 2008

Never Stop Learning (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About a Degree and Love My Craft)

I graduated from high school in 1993 and without much question headed off for college because, let’s face it, that’s what you do when you graduate from college.

After spending a year at the University of the Pacific, I made the tough decision to come back to my home state of Montana and transfer to Montana State University in Bozeman.

I am yet to graduate from college, though. Someday, I’ll finish a degree from an online school, mainly to fulfill promises made years ago to my parents.

However, just because I’m not in college at the moment, I never stop learning.

Peer Learning

Let your ego go and realize that you’ll never know everything. No matter how much you know, you can always learn more.

That is especially important in the web industry. Technology moves fast, things change, and closing your mind to learning something new is cutting yourself off from an opportunity to grow.

Though I’m sure it drives my wife nuts, I come home from work and get back on my PowerBook, searching the web for tidbits that could help me work better or more efficiently.

Thanks to a rather long list of RSS feeds, I spend most mornings reading articles from peers all over the world, and hopefully I learn something from it all to apply to that day’s work.

Why Not School?

Universities are a great source of learning, but I don’t think they move quickly enough when it comes to embracing current technology.

For example, on a whim, I registered for a course on “Web Design” through Montana State University – Billings. An online course. The course requirements (in 2005) were a copy of FrontPage and Photoshop Elements. It reminded me of a course in 1994 where we were required to learn Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. Not spreadsheets and word processing.

I promptly dropped the course. But not before I checked out the course’s website set up by the teacher. I was far from impressed.

Peer Teaching

I’ve made some contacts via the web that I consider friends and I continue to learn from these friends on an almost-daily basis. Which made me wonder, why aren’t universities embracing those who make their living on the web to help teach the next generation of web designers?

After all, who knows more about web design than someone who pays their mortgage doing it? Certainly not a university professor in an ivory tower!

A course in web design should not teach a certain piece of software. It should be software agnostic. I don’t care if your code is written in TextMate, CSSEdit or Coda, like mine. It’s the quality of the code that matters!

What We Can Do

Contact your local university or community college. Or even a high school. Volunteer to teach a course in web design. See what happens.

Even if just a few professionals get through and get to teach our craft to newcomers, we can help spread “the gospel” of web standards to the next generation of designers.

It is up to us to promote the well-being of our industry and to teach the best practices therein.