Brad Weikel's blog

In late March, I led a one day workshop in basic web design at the EarthRights School Burma (ERSB), ERI's school for emerging activists inside Burma and along the Thai-Burma border. The course, taught at the students' request, consisted of a brief introduction to HTML and CSS. These two topics are far too complex to cover in a single session, so my modest goal was that the students leave the class with enough knowledge of syntax and workflows to begin to explore these technologies themselves, so that in time they might be able to contribute to the websites of whatever organizations they work with in the future.

The ERSB students have a tremendous range of technical backgrounds; some had scarcely used a computer at all before arriving at ERSB, while others rarely let their laptops out of their sight. This breadth of experience was difficult to negotiate, both in the HTML class and my previous class on digital security, but I was pleasantly surprised by both the enthusiasm with which many of the students approached our workshop, and their willingness to share and teach each other throughout the day.

One unexpected challenge, which in hindsight I should have anticipated, was the American-English bias of CSS (HTML shares this bias, but has a smaller vocabulary that is easier to memorize). More than once, perplexed students asked me why their "colour" property values weren't working. While "color" vs. "colour" is confusing enough, more advanced CSS properties include many words that the students either weren't familiar with or didn't find intuitive: "white-space," "text-decoration," "overflow," "vertical-align" and many more. Web languages have a strict syntax and vocabulary, and do not tolerate variations, so students who were fluent enough to communicate verbally in English nonetheless found themselves blocked at every turn by subtle points of spelling and word choice.