or "The Choose Your Own Webcraft Adventure"

(Work in Progress)

The Background 

Good web developers never stop learning, they continue to update their skills, learn about new standards, frameworks and keep up-to-date with industry best practice.

The context of web development keeps on changing, so skill levels such as Intermediate, Advanced and Expert are often meaningless as there is no fixed standard to measure each other against.  A developer who considered themself to be an expert 5 years ago, may only be considered an intermediate developer today if they've neglected to keep pace with changes in technology, standards and current trends.

If School of Webcraft is going to help people become great web developers and continue to help developers as they return to learn new skills we need to find better ways of describing the next step in their learning. Descriptors such as "101, 201" and "Intermediate" aren't necessarily the best way of guiding someone to a particular course, especially since there are so many different types of specialist practice within web development (front end design, usability, security, back end development, information architecture etc).

We need to provide responsive choices.

The current approach I think we should take is to start mapping out the learning journeys of web developers from their very first uploaded web page and to break those journeys into appropriate 6-week learning blocks. After learners have gained a certain understanding of how to upload files to a web server, structural HTML and basic CSS, their initial journey begins to branch into different directions. For some learners, their next step is very obvious (I'm going to learn some JavaScript, or I'm going to learn more about positional CSS) but other people may need some help in determining what to learn next.

Unlike traditional learning which often encourages learners to ask "What Should I Learn Next?", School of Webcraft has the potential to quickly respond to learners when they say "What Can I Learn Next?", "I Want To Learn This Next!" or "I Want To Make This, How Can I Do That?".

So, I think we should try to pre-empt some of those questions and create a guide to the learning pathways. But a "Guide to Learning Pathways" sounds really boring and in keeping with occassionally being referred to as the "Hogwart's School of Webcraft" I suggest that we informally think of this as the "Choose Your Own Webcraft Adventure" resource.

More reading about Choose Your Own Adventure  / Gamebook narrative style.

Wikipedia (Gamebook)

Boing Boing (Map of Choose Your Own Adventure Book)