Separating Content from Form

One critical mistake teachers and trainers make involves the failure to separate content from form. This fundamental error in approach to complex topics frustrates learners and impedes understanding. Teachers and trainers are at times so narrowly caught up in their subject area that they lose sight of perspectives outside the field and are unwilling or too intellectually lazy to take the time to step back and address the challenges of someone for whom this subject is completely new or perplexing.

Avoiding cognitive overload

In an analogy that writing teachers will appreciate, process writing separates the focus on form from the focus on content. Content—what students say, their ideas, examples, and organization—is, initially, more important than form—how it's said, the particular structure and words they use to express them. Thus first drafts of papers should receive few or no comments on form (e.g., word choice, grammar, punctuation, spelling), because this would distract the student from concentrating on content. Furthermore, why correct form in a draft when that form will change to express reworked content anyway? It would be like touching up aesthetic blemishes in a primer coat of paint. It's a strategy of divide and conquer, of consciously avoiding cognitive overload, which is when your brain cries "uncle!" after trying to do too many things at once, and doing none very well.

Take another common example from classes across the college campus: making web pages. Teachers in many disciplines, from management to education, have students create web pages. Outside of a course in web development or design, why assign such a project? Besides keeping students up into the small hours IMing their frustration with the ambiguity and lack of structure, what's the benefit of such a task? True, it's challenging and requires problem solving and teamwork. Unfortunately, such assignments typically follow nothing but the most cursory introduction to the nature of document design on web pages, information structure of web sites, and how different this is from page design and the organization of printed matter. Then there is the enormous technical challenge. Was the tool designated to carry out the mechanics of this creation, such as Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage, similarly introduced and demonstrated? Not likely.

Editing a page in Dreamweaver

Editing a post in Blogger

Manipulating form does not imply content knowledge

The web is a complex medium, and development tools like Dreamweaver are technical and deep. As with another content tool common in college, PowerPoint, the ability to mechanically manipulate appearance and objects (the how) does not confer or imply knowledge about the information product (the what). Students come to appreciate this quickly. Why don't the teachers assigning these projects? (See related post on the failure to teach presentation design and delivery skills.)

This oversight, in addition to its risk of squandering student time and energy and achieving no expressed learning objective (or at least one billed on the syllabus), fails to exploit a teaching opportunity to provide a proper grounding in some basic concepts.

Rational web design counts as prerequisites many such concepts:

Design

• basic instructional design (pedagogically sound approach to presenting multimedia content to teach or inform):

  user interface (navigation, accessibility)

  interactivity (prompts, feedback)
  

  linear vs. random access (paths to information)
  

• basic information design (layout):

• organization (hierarchy)
  
• ordering and embedding informative elements
• graphic design (color, iconography, typography)

Technical

• page elements (text, graphics, links)
• layout tools (tables, alignment, images, CSS)
• file types (GIF, JPG, PNG, PDF, HTML, CSS, JS, etc.)
• file characteristics (e.g., color palette and transparency of graphics)
• integration of dynamic elements (RSS, SSI)
  
• file naming conventions (illegal characters, use of extensions)
• file management conventions (e.g., relative vs. absolute paths)
• file transfer (FTP)
• file hosting options (sponsored vs. fee-based)
• accommodating a variety of user capabilities (different connection speeds, operating systems, browsers, plug-ins, displays)

These and other relevant issues are rarely given their due outside of courses devoted to web development. And no wonder. This is time-consuming stuff, and many people have a great deal of difficulty with it.


Web 2.0: Content breaks free of form

One of the tangible benefits of what has become known as "Web 2.0" is the ability of non-technical users to easily create content on the web, most notably through wikis and blogs, like this one, but also photo sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa, collaborative/online writing tools like Google Docs or Buzzword, social networking sites like MySpace or FaceBook, and—to a lesser extent because of a different business model (fee-based not ad-driven)—ePortfolios. Web 2.0 is the term collectively, sometimes loosely, applied to a range of capabilities non-technical users can acess through a web browser alone. These "web apps" take the place of, in many cases, complicated and expensive software installed on the user's computer ("local apps," such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Dreamweaver). For the seminal blog post expounding Web 2.0, see Tim O'Reilly's "What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software."

One important implication of Web 2.0 capabilities, then, is how it facilitates the separation of content from form. The vast proliferation of blogs, wikis, and MySpace pages testifies to the impact on content development of removing issues of form from the process of publishing content. Anyone comfortable with word processing and web browsing, such as shopping online, can readily publish content with a professional look. In Web 1.0, we did it old school: publishers had to possess as much technical wherewithal as content knowledge—they were inseparable.

Using the prêt-à-por·ter, template-based approach to web publishing offered by Web 2.0 frees one to concentrate on the message, the content, rather than the arcane technical minutae constraining earlier custom approaches, which clearly explains the explosion in non-technical forums: web publishing has thus been democratized. What, then, explains the persistence of some teachers to compel students to use the means of an earlier development model in creating content on the web for class? I suspect it's twofold:

1. The teacher gets more mileage out of her own technical knowledge;
   
2. She passes on the pain of her own learning experience (the "why should today's kids have it easy" syndrome).
   

A more troubling possibility, which I won't dare include in this list of probable explanations, relates to the need some teachers have to make the student's challenge imposing, fed by the fiction that pain=gain is an effective learning strategy.

As teachers, if we recognize that our students have a limited amount of time to engage our subject—competing, as we are, with other classes and the seduction of countless time sinks like Facebook, YouTube, Xboxes, and the like—then we might take more care in constructing their assignments and keeping them focused on what's important.