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Synopsis: A student took two sets of classes to learn to create web pages. The results were, uh, disappointing. The same student used Tripod and GooglePages to create web pages. The results were rather impressive. Let's stop mistreating teachers by suggesting that they should know anything about web design. So one of my students took two HTML classes on campus. (I think this was coding in raw HTML.) The result: a single page, with a few links and several images.

Then she took four (4) Dreamweaver classes. The result: one page with some images and links. A second page with some tables on it. Both pages appeared to be mostly stuff that she was given and was supposed to edit. Four face-to-face classes.

The same student then created a site with Tripod. Now, I used to hate Tripod, but using this tool, and presumably no training, she created 5 consistently formatted and relatively attractive pages all with logical navigation. She even has a Vitae that's formatted pretty nicely. I cannot imagine how long it would have taken her to learn to do that with Dreamweaver.

The same student then created virtually the same site using Google Pages. Again, she created several nice looking pages, all better than those she created after considerable Dreamweaver training.

I don't think the student spent lots more time on the Tripod or Googlepages pages. I don't think that the HTML and Dreamweaver training offered by our Office of Information Technology is to blame. I do think that for most (at least 99%) humans on the planet, learning tools like Dreamweaver is a tremendous waste. I think that for people who plan to be classroom teachers, learning tools like Dreamweaver is completely unnecessary. I might be convinced that people need to learn a tiny bit of HTML so that they can recognize a couple tags and maybe type in an href, but I suspect that's just because a few blogs don't yet make it easy to include links. I also think that learning something about HTML teaches people some fundamental things about data representation. But that's probably because I was trained in computer science.

So, here's an idea for a study. We need two groups one "expert" group, which could be either (1) people who have taken some amount of training, or perhaps even actual experts who do web design. The second group knows virtually nothing about web publishing. Have both groups create a set of pages or solve a set of problems (create a link, insert an image, change the color scheme of all of their pages). It shouldn't be hard to design the assessment such that the novices outperform the experts.