I just got home from Web Directions North, a conference for web professionals. This year it was in Denver. The conference was founded in Australia in 2004, by Maxine Sherrin and John Allsopp the creators of Style Master software. The goal of Web Directions is to bring together, educate, and inspire the web industry’s leading experts from around the world.

I didn't attend the actual conference, but went to a pre-conference workshop day titled Educating the Next Generation of Web Professionals that featured a group of industry and academic people who are working to close the gap between what industry needs from web professionals and what education is producing in web programs. I also went to a Web Professional Education Summit the evening before the workshop.

Each session I attended, I attemped to live blog, beginning with this post, Web Professional Education Summit.

There were fewer people at the session I attended than the number attending on the main conference days. I asked a few of the people I ran into to submit to a brief interview so I could give you a peek, a bit of flavor, regarding the people in attendance. I didn't actually go there to meet women (really!) but these are some of the women I met. (For a report on the men I met, see this post at Web Teacher.)

First is Stephanie Troeth, the camera shy co-founder Book Oven. The first offering from this new company is a mass proofreading program. Book Oven is meant to help people finish books and create communities around their books. She was at the conference to present at the Educating the Next Generation of Web Professionals session. Stephanie has been involved with the Web Standards Project for a few years. In addition to education, she's also worked with them on internationalization issues related to web pages.

Shere Chamness from planet-realart.com started as a graphic artist and worked into web development. She came to meet people who do what does and because she lives in Denver. She was most interested in the accessibility session and the web apps session. She's like many women who are working on the web—self-taught, passionate about what she's learning, and eager to learn more.

Addison Berry from Rock Tree Sky and Lullabot attended the entire conference. She is a Drupal and Open Source developer and came to the conference to learn and to meet with others who might be interested in Open Source. You may remember Addi from Women in Tech: Addison Berry. She was very interested in the fact that the BlogHer conference is going to have a "geek track" running this year and wanted to know all about that.

Collene Mckenna is from University of Alaska Southeast. She teaches web design and wanted to come to a conference where people were interested in teaching web development. In Alaska, she teach mostly distance courses. For those of you who may be doing that, Collene says she uses Camtasia, Breeze, Illuminate Live and the CMS system at UAS to teach the online classes. She attended the education sessions and the full conference with its design and development tracks.

Leslie Jensen-Inman from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She's attending as a presenter at the Web Profesional Education Summit and as a part of the WaSP Interact (the curriculum framework) group. She is interested in continuing the dialog between industry and professional educators. Leslie recently published a monograph at Teach the Web giving the results from a number of interviews with web professionals. One thing she asked them was the skills that web professionals need. If you scroll about a fourth of way down the monograph page, you see all the skills that were named. It's the section introduced by

Below is a breakdown of the skills the interviewees deemed most important to teach students, followed by percentage that these skills were cited by the interviewees.

Pretty daunting list for an educator to try to give students. And you wondered why it seems like you're never finished learning everything you need to know.

Glenda Sims is at the University of Texas at Austin. Glenda helps support the central web site for the University. She is the Web Accessibility Coordinator and Web Standards Evangelist for the campus. She also serves as an accessibility consultant, judge and trainer for Knowbility. She said she attended for the face to face interaction with people she respects, to work on building the Interact web site (a best practices based curriculum resource), and to get a better understanding of HTML5. Glenda is Glenda the Good Witch (goodwitch on Twitter) and is absolutely an outstanding person to know in terms of accessibility.

Shauna Fjeld works at National Renewable Energy Laboration in Denver. She's a web developer who attended the conference to learn some new techniques. She went to the user experience session and the accessiblity for web app session. Like many I talked to, she was interested in the "big thing" going on around web apps right now.

Andrea Hill is Director of Social Media and Interactive Technology at Worldways Social Marketing Company. Social marketing, which is not related to social media, is marketing intended to produce social change. Social Marketing includes things like public service ads. It was around long before social media came along. She came to the conference to learn about upcoming trends, network, meet people and to keep her own skills up to date.

Cindy Li is a talented freelance designer who volunteered to help stage manage Web Directions North. A good tip for anyone who can't quite afford a conference: volunteer. She attended previous conferences and found it a good experience so she got an admission by helping out. She enjoys the face to face conversation with people and the networking. Her portfolio site is at Design Rabbit.

Liliana Troy lives in Denver, so attending Web Directions North was a natual for her. And then there's her job: she works for Mapquest. She came to the conference to learn about new directions in design and usabilty. At Mapquest, she is a user experience designer. She attended the design sessions.

Allison Kramer is a freelancer at Create to Complete. She's web designer also does and print catalogs and brochures. Lately she's been concentrating on web design and search engine optimization. She came to network and see what others are doing and learn new skills. She attended the design sessions.

As for me, I had a great time being in a place where everyone wanted to talk about the same things I like to talk about. I want to go again, except next time I want to go to a session in Australia. Get me down under, I've already been to Denver!

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Virginia DeBolt
BlogHer Technology Contributing Editor
Web Teacher
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