This page has been edited with permission from Dr. Keith Mitchell. This information appeared on Apple's web site from 1997-1999. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the Technology Applications Center for Educator Development or the Texas Education Agency.

Web Mastering for Today's Digital Press
by Keith Mitchell, Ph.D. - Education Development Executive for Apple Computer, Inc.

WEB MASTER NEEDED: 10 YEARS EXPERIENCE REQUIRED

David Thornburg in delivering a keynote recently asked his audience to imagine this help wanted ad. The implied humor is, of course, how the World Wide Web has created an exciting career opportunity seemingly overnight. Also implied is the challenge for educators to understand and respond in a timely fashion. With the introduction of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and easy to use browsers, the information age has literally exploded onto the scene ready to impact almost every aspect of our lives. Education must place itself in a perpetual ongoing observation mode, hoping to understand, to impact, and to prepare students as participants and contributors to this new and evolving information resource. The Web continues to build on its university heritage to provide research tools for convenient access to a global shared knowledge base. New collaborative tools with support for telephony, video conferencing, live and stored discussion forums, etc. have become the catalyst for subject specific "watering holes," a multitude of gathering places for people of common interest to join and share their ideas. Education is quickly adopting the Web as a support tool for changing instructional methodology, for teacher professional development, and for bringing educators together to share effective practices. The potential impact on national and global commerce is driving huge investments in corporate Web activity. The World Wide Web is a new global highway and we are currently determining as a society what type of traffic and what kind of cargo will be transported. It is obvious educator's participation will surely have an impact on our national and personal economic success. 

Defining a new curriculum for Web authoring skills is like taking a snapshot of a fast moving car. New web authoring tools, new information types, and new standards are being introduced at an incredible rate. In the design of your Web Mastering curriculum we could focus on preparing a future professional web master. He or she might be creating and maintaining the Internet presence of a large corporation delivering their marketing messages or possibly conducting business on the net. This individual might need in depth skills in programming, database design and maintenance, security measures, e-commerce, and design and support of collaborative systems. The curriculum might alternatively focus on a more casual web author. The emerging importance of local intranets in conducting day to day internal communications for education and business suggests that almost anyone would benefit from some baseline skills in communicating with the web. Our casual web author might need to post an announcement, host a collaborative web based meeting, maintain a company calendar, or submit reports or grant requests in the highly formatted format that HTML supports. The expectation is that education institutions, small and medium businesses, and even self-employed individual consultants will maintain some type of Web existence. The bulk of the information on the web now is probably being created by casual authors with beginning skills. So where do we aim our curriculum? Obviously there is a middle ground of common skills that both help students explore skills sets required by the professional web master and deliver the basics that will allow anyone to author and post information to the Internet.

Selecting software and hardware tools for web mastering will be an ongoing process as the nature of the web and how it is used unfolds. Students will need to have access to the raw media that will be used to construct web pages including formatted text, graphics/images in 2D and 3D formats, animation, audio, and video. These requirements can be partially filled with an ample supply of clip media, but also indicate the need for basic creation and editing tools for each of these media types. After a message has been defined, a web page planned, the media "bricks" obtained, a web authoring tool is required to "glue" or integrate all of the pieces into an interactive, media rich web page that communicates effectively. The casual author will have little need to work with HTML code as high level authoring languages are developed. It would also be good for all students to use simple site based management tools that make it easy to maintain and troubleshoot sites that are more than a few pages in stature. The prospective web master needs to have access to a web server either on the campus intranet or on the global Internet for a larger audience. A more difficult decision will be to what extent we expose students to more challenging web development tools such as Java authoring tools, streaming technologies, DHTML, web access database engines, or CGI development. 

The Web Mastering curriculum will certainly focus on products. I recommend students work to identify their communication goals, define an appropriate information structure, design and develop a visual interface, locate or create component media, use web authoring tool to bring everything together into a finished page, publish the page on a web server, conduct tests and evaluate their visual interface, determine if the page is technically robust, and finally evaluate if the web site is effective in communicating its message. The web site should be large enough in scope to require a collaborative team effort. This approach will cause individual students to focus their learning in areas of interest and expose everyone in the class to a wider variety of concepts. For example individual teams could be responsible for carrying out the following functions and to share the skills they learn in the process.

• Graphics development and visual interface design
• Research and collection of component media
• Creative writing and formatting of text
• Creating the visual layout with a web authoring tool
• Making a database available to the page
• Development of and integration of dynamic data types: such as GIF or Shockwave animation, MIDI, Real audio, QuickTime VR, or QuickTime digital video

Finally, additional studies should include career investigations, interviews with professional web masters, and investigation of degree programs leading to careers that would require web mastering skills.

The experience should result in student developed Web based products that are perceived as having a purpose to both the students and their community. The time spent on mastering individual web authoring tools and more importantly producing web based products will accomplish most of the issues covered in the TEKS but additional resources will have to be incorporated to insure students are learning quality skills as defined by the curriculum and the industries involved. Much of the additional resources such as those involving ethics, copyright, or even style can be obtained from student research on the Internet.