Internet Web Page Design Class
Karen
Smith's Web page design class at Charlotte High School is unique in
Florida. It is one of only two such classes in
the entire state.
I had
the privilege of addressing one of her classes while participating in
the Charlotte County Chamber of Commerce school program not long
before the end of the school year. It was a learning experience for
me. After the initial ice breaking first few minutes, I realized
not much has changed since I went to school in Miami many years ago.
With the exception of the PCs in the room the room could have been
Southwest High in 1959. The students were the same, just dressed
differently. They still have the same looks and attitudes as we had.
Some were attentive, some dozed off. Some asked questions, some
couldn't be bothered with looking up. The
interest picked up when discussing the future of the Internet and
making money in Web design or related fields. Everyone listened when
we talked about money. There are many resources available, both
online or through traditional print media, to look at today's
salaries.
Still,
$10 an hour sounds like a fortune to a 17-year-old who can't see the
$14,000 to $20,000 annual salary that may turn out to be. When
talking about corporate IT (Information Technologies) staff salaries
available in Atlanta, Tampa or Miami, even in Charlotte County, the
eyes seemed to glaze ever so slightly.
Yet
most of the students seemed to accept the current technologies as a
basis for planning their futures. Those technologies will evolve
drastically in the four or five years it now takes to get a
bachelor's degree. Dial-up access to the Internet through Internet
Service Providers (ISPs) will decrease as access through live
“constantly on” broadband or Digital Link Subscriber (DSL) will
become the defacto method of connecting to the
Internet. Perhaps even wireless methods will dominate. Whatever it
is, it won't he what we use today.
The
current dip in Palm and other Personal Digital Assistants has the
wireless people scurrying to recapture market momentum from last
year. The one thing that is certain is change. Planning for the
future must be based on goals, not today's hardware or programming.
If
attaining those goals requires learning today's hardware and
programming languages, those languages must be considered a building
block to future skill sets, not the end of the educational stream.
Future programming in the consumer, perhaps even the corporate arena,
will be probably done "robot" software that simply writes
the code you specify. Who writes the "robot" software?
Somewhere there will be well-trained people who will make it all
happen. They will make more than $10 an hour. Some of them just may
come from Karen Smith's Web design class.
Those
students bound for college already know their education is the key to
their future earning power. A few
of the students seemed to expect money to fall out of the trees.
Maybe
they don't teach keypunches anymore, but some things just don't
change.
George Mindling ©
2001
