17 October, 2008

This is a sort of screaming into my pillow kind of post. A sort of You have got to be fucking kidding sort of thing. This year is going to take the cake for the kick in the guts from fuckwits who don’t know better episodes. I am not sure whether my students sensed something today or whether they were in Friday mode and responding to something in me but they were freaking awesome, relaxed and easy to work with. I even saw some effort put into things I care about which is always nice.

… but here is the scenario, which I record to look back on later to evaluate and make a decision on. Friday, in general for me is a suck day. I start with Y10s, who are great, playful and often a joy to teach but fucking hard work; duty (of care? … or guard?) in the library computer room with much the same students and then an afternoon of Year 11s (Fifth formers – 14, 15, 16 year olds) for two hours. Today, fifteen minutes before my Y11 class I was “called” into a meeting to discuss the school web site.

When I first started teaching, 3 years ago,  the web site had just been redesigned. It had a Flash splash screen, was a static web site, built in Dreamweaver and we were unable to upload anything due to a useless host. Courses were mashed into single huge HTML pages and the visual style was, quite frankly amateur and pathetic. In short they had been ripped off. Over the last year I have worked to place us into Drupal, hosted with our NZ Open Source in Business award winner, updated the style to match the rest of the brand, XHTML/CSS’d the fucker, set up departments as groups, allowed staff to login and edit content within those departments, provided mechanisms for promoting specific courses and even started working on a way to post daily notices automatically. Google Analytics is showing increased traffic to Courses and About Us and we have a clear path forward. I did all of this in consultation with senior management, marketing, and students (as any good designer would – documenting the lot) and in my ultimate stupidity I did it on a volunteer basis. I should know better. As I am seeing with Open Source in this country, if it doesn’t cost anything it isn’t of value. Man, I should have learned that one by now. I’ve been shafted by fucking NZers before on this … I should know better. Nice guys finish last and all that.

Now, I don’t claim to be Mr Wonderful on much but if there is one thing I just “get” it’s working with the Web. I don’t know why, maybe it’s the structure, the communication, the freedom … who knows, who cares. I just get it. I love it, I want to use it with students. I like the people who work with it. I like the way different age groups, especially kids use it. The olds who are blocking it, jamming it, stopping freedom, restricting the use of social networking etc have got it wrong. I know it, I feel it … they are just plain wrong. Flash splash screens are a known issue – Hell, Jakob Neilsen has been wanking on about it for years (and he’s freaking right). Designing for your target audience is well understood – fuck, schools have a Technology Curriculum dedicated to this, we’ve had Web2.0 as an idea for long enough it should have filtered through to even the most draconian systems by now … 

I have said nothing specific and probably won’t. Between the lines is where it’s at here but the frustration is real. Our education system is mostly fucked – and I work in one of the really flexible schools. Mediocrity is our aim and we very rarely even hit that. What a fucked way to end the week. So much for my detox.