"Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime."
This is the philosophy in Web Communications.
We try to regularly step back and take a good hard look at what we do and how we do it. For the first several years of our existence, we spent most of our time building Web sites for other departments and then handing the client the keys. This was a complete failure for many reasons. First of all, we broke our own cardinal rule which is "do not build what you cannot sustain." Second of all, we were destined to disappointment because the site soon bore no resemblance to what we'd created because the owner didn't have the skills needed to manage the site. We had the best of intentions, but, the result wasn't what we'd hoped to see.
Education and training, although not initially part of our mission, has now become a core part of what we do in Web Communications. This blog, in fact, was developed as a means to communicate with our campus Web developers. We now teach through a variety of methods. Each one of our staff are gifted in different ways and each one came to the department with a love of learning. This has now evolved into a love of teaching. There continue to be monthly Web Developer meetings and part of the agenda is usually devoted to a training activity. However, we've now expanded this by hosting some smaller workshops that allow people to explore more specific areas of interest such as information architecture and CSS.
We'll be doing more of this in the coming year and would love to know what topics interest our campus colleagues. If you have an idea, please let us know. We're interested in knowing how we can help.
