Eclectic Brain Salad

We woke up and had to pack up all our stuff. Today was a bit depressing really. Yes, we had a while day in Syndey before having to leave for the UK, and it would be lovely to see Lisa and Lach again for a bit, but it was Sad to go - this really was drawing the curtains on our holiday.

After checking out of the hotel we let Gabriel play in the swimming pool while I sat and caught up on blog posts and work, and Kirsty went for a walk with Elva. We couldn't really do much today in terms of seeing cool stuff before the flight back to Sydney, as the decided to rain. Gabriel's spirit impressed me however (as it always does) - even though it was raining quite heavily at some points of the morning, Gabriel was not phased, and still had loads of fun in the pool, jumping in and making lots of noise ;-)

In the afternoon we went for a leisurely walk round the Cairns botanical gardens and saw lots of really odd plants, then it was back to the hotel to get the taxi to the airport. The flight back to Cairns was uneventful, as was the taxi ride to Lisa and Lach's place. A long day, so early nights for all.

On Sunday we had a lovely chillout - we all got up and took the dogs down to the park for a good run about. We dropped Lis, Kirsty, Gabriel, Elva and the kids off, and then Lach and I went off to play hunter gatherers - we men, we bring women and children food! Well, we did have a cafe and a cake shop to help us out, but yah know...

We got back to the park and ate breakfast, then we spent ages chatting to various other dog owners that were out walking. We also saw some jellyfish in the river, and a dead possum (the park ranger seemed very displeased by being summoned to clear it up!), and Gabriel also impressed us by not falling in the river (he seems to have an unerring ability to fall into pretty much any body of water that he gets close to). I really loved the way that the local community around the park seemed so friendly.

After groovin' in the park, Lisa had the great idea of taking Kirsty to a market to have a look round, and Lach decided that a BBQ would be a good idea so we again went into hunter gatherer mode, and forraged around the badlands of Sydney for loads of meat and loads of beer.

We then went to the market to pick the ladies up and have a look ourselves - I was very pleased to come across some dodgy old prog vinyl (Emerson Lake and Palmer, and Mahavishnu Orchestra).

Then the rock and roll BBQ began! We went home to get salads and dips sorted, started drinking beer, cooked loads of amazing meat, talked complete nonsense for ages, listened to some very bizarre eclectic music (and bird calls) thanks to DJ Lisa, then watched more Mighty Boosh and Primus videos. CSS guru Lindsay Evans also came over for a while to share in the jollity - good to chat to him again (hint: follow Lindsay on Twitter - he is bloody hilarious, and spot on). Pretty much the last thing I remember is Lach deciding to fry sausages at 2am, then eating them with tonnes of hot English Mustard. Mmmmmm, firey! after the beer ran out, we stole Scenario Grrrrl's vodka. I think it is fair to say that we were pretty drunk by that point ;-)

This was a slightly more challenging day than the last one, work-wise, as Lisa and Lach are having troubles with their connectivity at home. So after getting some editing done offline of various articles and suchlike, I joined my family in walking into Annandale to find a place to lunch, and a place to get Kirsty's hair done.

I ate a really gorgeous meal involving corn fritters, bacon and haloumi cheese, then it was off to the hair dressers to get Kirsty pampered. At this point, the day kicked into life - John Allsopp phoned me to say that I had a guest lecture slot at UTS at 4pm. By this point it was 1pm, so I had three hours to work out what I was talking about, and get to where I needed to be! I love spontaneity, but this is kind of ridiculous! Still, major props to John and Yiying for helping me set this up - it was very nice to get another uni talk sorted out at such short notice (about 2 days from me sending them a request for help!)

So, off to the coffee shop to drink coffee, eat cake and check e-mail! I got my plans for later on that night sorted out, and caught a rather convenient bus to right outside the university. After figuring out the rather confusing building layout, I got to the right floor, and found the university contacts.

I ended up presenting a slightly abridged version of my Ukranian university tour slides, and they seemed to go down pretty well - I threw in some open web philosophy to start off with, then talked about SVG, CSS 3 and HTML 5, accessibility, mobile web, and a few other web 3.0 love nuggets. the students asked some great questions, and I was impressed with their knowledge and enthusiasm.

After a quick chat with the UTS folk, I made my way to the Ruby Oceania meetup, to listen to some interesting Ruby talks and drink some beer. I know very little about server-side programming, so it proved to be a very interesting learning experience! It was also nice to catch up with Lach, Toolmantim, and Ben Buchanan, and meet some cool new people.

I was rather amused that the very first talk was all about how we should just implement all our functionality in JavaScript and do things on the client-side, and sod Ruby...that guy had balls of steel ;-)

Other notable talks were Tim talking about how he implemented Tweeps (the Web Directions South Twitter aggregator app), and his fellow Agency Rainford cohort Miles talking about his new Unit Testing library.

After the talks were done, the beer started to flow very freely, and there was much rejoicing! On the way home Lach showed me the delights of eating a drunken doner kebab, Australian style...which is pretty much the same as eating a drunken doner kebab, English style.

I still hadn't got much sleep by the morning of day 2, as my daughter decided to start screaming at 2am. Oh well.

I had a lovely big fry up-style breakfast in the cafe next to the hotel, sharing toast and jollities with my family, Leslie, Shaun and Ash. After a nice chill up, Leslie, Ash and I took the monorail to the workshop venue, and started to get set up. We managed to get ready in time, despite a few small measures of equipment fuck-wittage (forgetting my VGA adaptor, not having the right version of Keynote installed on the other presenter's computers - thank you Apple for your wonderful hardware and version backwards compatibility).

We had a small but dedicated group of attendees, plus Ben Buchanan and Mark Boulton showed up nice and early to swell the numbers. It was time for Ed Directions Sydney!

Setting the scene

I presented the first talk, which set the scene, outlined what we would discuss today, and talked about the resources we had available. It made me laugh that almost all of the attendees were already using the Opera Web standards curriculum and WaSP InterAct material, and were very progressive in terms of the courses they presented. So they weren't really the target audience we need to reach the most!

But I think this is the issue with these kind of events. The educators that don't "get it" are the ones that are less lively to turn up to these events. But I think that if we connect with educators that DO "get it", we can get them to continue local evangelism work and spread our message far and wide.

Ben Buchanan on markup

Ben delivered a great presentation about markup - everything I could've hoped for and more. He didn't show too much code, instead concentrating on transferable principles and good practice - good semantics, accessibility, validation. He didn't dwell on HTML 5 too much either, which was good, as I think it is a red herring right now, as far as educators are concerned.

He also included a great section on how he hires (or doesn't hire) job applicants at his company - he asks for resumes in HTML, then immediately rejects candidates on bad markup and writing. People who pass the initial test are given rigorous tests.

Mark Boulton on design and CSS

Mark's talk was great as well - he again didn't concentrate on too much syntax. The main crux of his talk was that designers aren't built to learn ordered, structured C-O-D-E, so concepts such as specificity and positioning are hard to get through to them. They want to gravitate to "the shiny" - fun visual stuff, but they need to have a solid grounding in the slightly scary principles first.

Give it to them as gently and as visually as possible.

There was so much discussion about teaching techniques during these sessions that I didn't have to cover the markup and CSS classroom integration sessions - all my educational techniques were discussed already ;-)

Cameron Adams - Scripting

Cameron presented a slightly more straight talk on JavaScript from start to finish, containing a bit more syntax, but it was still top-notch, covering all bases. He made some good points about starting small with little JavaScript features, and then progressing to web applications. He also mentioned that people were likely to be in one of two camps - application writers, or web page writers. Also, he talked about how validation and unobtrusiveness were not necessarily absolute essentials - they were things to strive for always, but depending on the target audience, some apps would be ok to absolutely require JavaScript. Think of functionality like Google Maps and Google Wave. He also talked about how libraries were a great teaching aid, and took a lot of the horrible complexity of some JavaScript operations away from the developer, for example cross browser event handlers. But you should still aim to start at first principles and not just teach a JS library. You can't guarantee that every project you come across will use the same JS library!

Lisa Herrod - Accessibility/Usability

Scenario girl's talk was really great - she delivered it from the inclusive design angle, which was a great slant. She showed how she has taken the WCAG checkpoints and given them different labels to show who in a project team should have the responsibility of making sure these points are addressed. It's not all the front-end developer; some of it falls upon the content writer for example, or the designer. This is a great way to split the workload up a bit, and make accessibility feel less of a burden to handle. Of course, we really need to get away from accessibility being a bolt-on accessory at the end of a project; too many people still think of it this way.

At this point, I started to feel really tried again. I looked so obviously jet-lagged that Lisa sent me out of the room ;-)

Jeremy Yuille created some really cool sketch notes from Lisa's talk.

Educator panel

We rounded off the day with a educator's panel, which turned into a big open discussion, as most people there were educators with lots to say! We talked about our own experiences, shared ideas, and had a great fun.

I think the day was a success - we got a look of good thinking done, and made some great new friends. Leslie was taking video of all the talks, so hopefully this will be available soon.

WE rock in the evening

As soon as we had finished the workshop, we had to rush over the the WE rock event venue and get set up! By this point I was so tired with jet lag that I wasn't making much sense, but I will recount what I can remember of the evening here.

I had some great conversations before the event started with Gian Wild, and a few others. The room was mostly full of web geeks and educators who already seem to "get it", so I don't think the talk material had as appropriate a target audience as the one in Chattanooga (the material is fairly low level, and I think, most appropriate to non-geeks, education administrators, etc), but it still seemed to go down well, and strike a lot of nerves.

Leslie talked about the education challenge and the opportunity it created (getting me to come up on stage to talk about the Opera web standards curriculum half way through.) I then came back on stage to talk about why web standards are so important to teach. Then Christian Crumlish talked about Yahoo Juku, Jeremy Yuille gave his take on education from an interaction design perspective and the need from transferrable skills, and John Allsopp rounded things off.

It was great to talk to Jeremy some more afterwards, and Ricky Onsman (who had been at the workshop earlier in the day), and my colleague Daniel from Opera, who brought me a wonderful cute little Japanese beer (135ml of Asahi - so cute!) But it was time for me to hit the sack.

As I write this, I actually feel awake for the first time since being here. Yes!