Slides from week 3 of DM250. We were talking about working with clients and making money.

These are the slides for my week 2 class. It’s all about stylesheets and how to use them this week.

I’ll use these slides during my class on 07 September 2009.

I haven’t written about any recent favourites lately, and I have a few new ones. So. Here we go.

• Arctic Monkeys – Humbug
  An excellent record from Arctic Monkeys. It’s a bit moodier than their previous offerings and a bit more chill.
• Green Curry
  Not exactly a new favourite, but I’ve been eating it a lot the last couple days.
• Teaching
  I love it. I could definitely see myself going into teaching as a primary career at some point. As long as the teaching was along the lines of web design and new media marketing. Maybe after I’ve got that MA I’m jonesing after. I think ideally I’d like to teach college and do freelance. And that’s all.
• Winston Churchill
  Again, not exactly a new favourite, but I’m hoping to read a lot more about him and his life in the coming months. The HBO movies The Gathering Storm and Into the Storm are excellent.

It’s September now and that means my birthday is coming up. I will be 25 years old. For some reason that has been resting heavily on my mind the last couple of weeks. It’s almost as if I feel like I will actually be a real adult. As if I’ve been playing the grown up game the last four years or so.

And with that feeling the ever-present urge to move on someplace resurfaces with resounding gusto. I don’t want to feel like I’ve wasted my young life in this small town. I want to go and do something different. Even at 25 the notion that life is short has hit me hard and I don’t want to sit idly by watching the years pass as I feel like I’ve done the past nearly three years. Perhaps I need to make things happen. Or perhaps I need to wait and see if any of my leads pan out. I’ve always had a hard time with patience.

Only time will tell.

Tomorrow is my first class period teaching a college-level course. I am excited and maybe a little bit nervous. But I think I’m ready. I’ve got the class pretty much planned out. And tonight I finished my Keynote presentation for the class. Check it out.

Hey! This is my first attempt at crowdsourcing on my blog, but I need help from you guys and gals. Here’s the skinny:

I’m teaching a basic web design class this fall semester. Supposedly most of the students won’t know anything about XHTML, CSS, divs, javascript, headers… anything. But I know some of them will. I don’t want to start the class out too slowly, so the very first thing I’m having them do is take an assessment for me to gauge what they know and don’t know.

But I need help with questions. Will you help me out? If I can get 10 people to leave a question about web design in the comments, I will be a very happy camper. If more than 10 do this, I’ll be ecstatic.

Questions should be relatively basic (probably not getting too detailed into browser-specific hacks or JS logic), and can concern HTML, XHTML, CSS, tags, elements, floats, images and even go into things like RSS, PHP (well, server-side scripting) and basic JS.

So what do you say? Help!!!

In a couple of weeks I will making my initial foray into college-level teaching. Last week I signed my first adjunct contract to teach Web Page Design to a group of Sophomores through Seniors. I am really excited about this job, to tell the truth. I think it’ll be a lot of fun and a good experience for me as a designer.

The class is once a week on Monday evenings for three hours. It’s an introductory web design class, so I’ll be teaching the most basic of XHTML and CSS. But I am hoping that this group of Digital Media students will catch on quickly enough that we can really get into the cool stuff.

Beyond markup and stylesheets I will be teaching them some design. Some actual design. Because I think that’s part of what the class has been lacking (from the students I’ve known in previous classes). The students in my class will be following good design blogs and hopefully learning some trends.

As a new teacher I think I’m lucky to have such great online resources available, in the form of so many design blogs.

Is there anything specific you would want to learn in a class like this if, of course, you were taking it? I’d be interested to know what you think is important.