Blending and Teaching

Published 20 years, 11 months past

The Color Blender has been updated to be one standalone file, so you can save it to your hard drive easily.  I also put it under a Creative Commons license, which I should have done in the first place.  Feel free to share and enjoy.  Now I’m really going to try to make this my last blender-related post for a good long while.  (Unless I make observations about margaritas.)

Daniel Sternberg has some interesting questions about what makes a computer science teacher.  It’s a question that’s been on my mind as I try to pull together a series of outlines for four-week seminars on standards-based Web design and CSS.  You can guess that this is intended for a community college because they’re willing to let me teach this stuff without a PhD in computer science.  Heck, I don’t even have a CS degree of any kind, unless you count a minor in artificial intelligence, and that was focused on the philosophical aspects of it.  Allow a History major to teach in a computer science department at a University?  Please.  I’d have about as much of a chance to be nominated head of the Congressional Black Caucus.

And yet, am I not qualified to teach students how to assemble a Web design, and about the underpinnings of today’s Web, with an eye to the future?  I certainly think I am, at least from a skills point of view; whether or not I’d make a good teacher of people is another question entirely, of course.  The deepest experts can be the worst teachers, something all of us probably encountered at some point in our educational experiences.

So it’s been interesting to be contacted by people from community colleges and business schools to come speak, but not hear a peep from the CS departments in my area.  Not at all unexpected, obviously, but still interesting.


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