Transcript

Jen

This is the Web Ahead, a weekly conversation about changing technologies and the future of the web. I’m you host Jen Simmons, and this is episode number 71. I first want to say thank you so much to today’s sponsor, Media Temple for helping to make the show possible and introduce both our topic and our fabulous guest. Today, we’re gonna talk about education which is a topic that’s come up before, I think it was back in gosh a long time ago now, when we did a show on education that was basically me and Dan, Dan Benjamin, the founder of 5by5, kinda hanging out episode 13, hanging out and talking about how do you keep up how do we keep up how do people, how do we all keep up with how quick the web is changing and educating ourselves, and what are the best places to maybe keep an eye on. How things are, the trends and the new technology, and where did we learn in the first place, but I thought you know it would be really great to have a much more sort of official and formal discussion about education from someone who actually knows more than just their own anecdotal experience. So today’s guest is Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman. Hello Leslie.

Leslie

Hi!

Jen

I just threw the doctor part on there just to make you extra fancy.

Leslie

Thanks, my mom will appreciate that a lot

Jen

Nice so you’re a web person, you’ve been writing on all the official places and all the fancy places, and speaking, traveling around and working with Jared Spool the last several years on creating both an institute a school for people to a new school for people to go and learn web design and also in sort of becoming an expert in what the heck is going on, what is it that schools need to be doing and how can we close the gap between those two different things. Is that accurate? Yes?

Leslie

I, yes, I think that’s pretty accurate. I’m really interested in finding the gap the skills gap that’s really between education and industry and figuring out how we start minding the gap; let’s make the gap less. And prepare graduates to be industry ready designers. So that’s my focus, and I think it’s really important to not only connect industry and education, but also looping community to that and that has some different meanings so a really kinda well balances approach to creating designers that can be effective when they go to work on day one.

Jen

Nice, so you’ve been teaching as well, you taught for five years as a assistant professor and you have both an MFA and a PhD, so I imagine that means you’ve taught a lot before becoming an assistant professor as well, as an adjunct or just classes.

Leslie

Yeah, you know I think I’m probably pretty wired to be a person that enjoys helping others and leaning in different ways some traditionally and some less traditionally. Before I was an assistant professor at the University at Tennessee at Chattanooga I did adjunct up at Shepherd University in West Virginia, like of all places, but it’s a really cool program, and I was able to kinda see if teaching was something I really wanted to go into, and you know I found that yeah it was, and I did teach ot the university level for five years, which was a great experience and through that time Id di finish my MFA, and it’s an EDD which is like a PhD, still get the doctor except it’s a little bit more focused on learning through doing versus just the theory. So most of my work was project based learning that was mixed with theory, so for me that’s way more interesting because that is really how adults, kids even, tend to learn, and so for me that’s definitely the way I learn, so an EDD was a much better choice for me.

Jen

So what do you, how do you think how is the state of web design and web development education these days in the US or globally, how do you think it’s going? I mean, there are a lot of schools are offering different kinds of degrees, there seems be a lot of inconsistency between them and what trends do you see, or how do you think, are we doing well, are we not doing well?

Leslie

Well I guess the best people to ask that question to are hiring managers, are people being able to hire for the skills that they need for their teams? Jared and I, we’ve been going and for the last two plus years have been talking with hiring managers and with design professionals with recent graduations, even with educators and trying to get a sense of what currently is the state of design education in general. We’ve been focusing a little but more on UX than specifically web design, but the kind of trends that we’re seeing are hiring managers really want people that have really strong soft skills and really know how to work with a team and collaborate. And a lot of traditional academic environments don’t really allow students to practice these kinds of skills. A lot of traditional design school may be like “Hey, you’ve gotta make a website and you just make it by yourself and you’re not working with a team, and you might not even build it out or do any of the front end dev stuff and what we’re seeing is a real need and trend towards hiring design, junior design generalists and so people that have a really nice foundation and a lot of different skills and one of those skill of course is the soft skills and working with other people and if you’re working on a project by yourself in a classroom environment, you don’t really get the chance to connect and collaborate and learn how to communicate and facilitate meetings and all the things that we as professionals in the field actually do on a regular basis. So that’s one place where a lot of academic environments can really improve, but it’s really challenging, it’s not for a lack of trying on professor’s parts, the structure of a lot of traditional academic environments just makes it really hard to produce industry ready graduates.

Jen

Yeah, it does seem, I think it’s seen as cheating in a way, like if you work with your classmates on, if somebody helps you come and do your project, then that’s cheating, you’re supposed to do it completely by yourself.

Leslie

Yeah, but it’s really an interesting thing, I understand where it comes from, it comes from a lot of testing and you know, if you’re working with somebody else on a test that in a lot of ways seems like cheating, but I don’t know about you Jen, but most of my days, I don’t go through the day without working with other people all day long.

Jen

Yeah.

Leslie

And it’s not cheating, like yeah I have to, it’s challenging.

Jen

Yeah.

Leslie

And if you don’t have practice in that, then how do you go and be effective in the workplace? I mean your first kinda couple jobs you’re learning how to do that, but wouldn’t it be great if we graduated students with the skills to already know, at least the basics, the foundations, of working with other people. So that they can have a successful day one week one, month one of their employment with a new company.

Jen

Yeah. So do you think, I mean there are a lot of students who listen to this show and are trying to take classes trying to find the right program to go to, trying to find a place that they can learn how to be a great designer or developer and I think sometimes they’re struggling or they’re wondering whether or not a traditional education is the right place to go to do that kind of thing, what might you say to them about either how to find the right program or how to augment what they’re doing if they’re in a a class where like they never get a group project but they just heard you say that’s a very important skill…

Jen

Yeah, I think that’s really key for all students, for whatever level to remember is that your education is your responsibility, and nobody else is going to advocate for it as much as you will it doesn’t really matter to anyone else as much as it matters to you so it’s, if you’re in a traditional academic environment, it’s finding ways to do maybe individual studies, some schools call them independent studies, or directed studies, or small group studies, or internships, basically creating your own curriculum in a way and a lot of schools do have electives open where you can basically work within the system to build up some of the skills that you might not be getting in a traditional classroom environment, so I would suggest working as much as possible in collaborative ways on group projects. And a lot of that comes from internships sometimes universities and traditional academic environments will allow you to have a small group that works on a project together, so it’s really making those kind of classes work for you and work with other people and make them project based learning. So it’s not just like, here write a paper. I mean writing’s really critical it’s one thing that designers don’t I think really realize when they’re young designers in school writing is really critical. Writing a term paper might not exactly be the kind of writing you need to learn how to do. Like practicing writing blog posts and human readable text is probably a lot more relevant to getting a job in the future. So I think it’s about making education your own, taking responsibility for it, trying to find the people at the school that’ll work with you that are innovative thinking, they might be professors that are frustrated with the structure or the fact that changing course curriculum takes two or three years in most places, and finding those people and have them help you really create a program that gets you to where you need to be.

Jen

That’s a really good point. That if you have kind of a crappy program, but you’ve got one decent professor who seems to kinda get it, but somehow isn’t giving you everything you want, you could go to that professor, privately, and say I’d love to do an independent study with you I feel like I need this I’d love to do this other thing and they might actually be really, really into it.

Leslie

They might be really excited because it’s challenging, it’s something new for them probably too. They’re probably going to learn with you a little bit and find those kind of professors or educators those are the key to having a successful time at a school and having them be a part of the process and having them feel like this is an exciting thing to do. As you pointed out, really the point, a lot of these conversations are better suited in a one on one situation and you know going to see a teacher in an office hours of one on one. Ask them to help you reach your full potential. A lot of educators get into teaching because that’s what they want to do, they want to help other people, and sometimes they get a little stifled because the system sort of not really there to support them and helping students do that.. So if you can kind of give them an opportunity to stretch their wings, they’re going to be happy, too.

Jen

Yeah. So do you think that the classes and the programs that are out there are any good, do you see good work being done? I remember I went to grad school, I mean I think there’s two different levels, too sort of the “Are there any classes at all that have to do with the web, a lot of schools don’t have any, or there’s like a few in the art program, and then a few in the computer science department, and a few in this other department, and they’re all kind of separate from each other and none of them really add up to anything. And then, yeah. And then, I feel like I’m asking the biggest question I could possibly ask, I should ask smaller questions, but then it’s like you get into those classes and on the one hand, if they’re good, they might be really good because they’re a lot about this history, or the theory or some of the bigger picture stuff, but what a lot of people really really want is like, “No, teach me Photoshop, no teach me the new latest responsive web design media query CSS. Teach me….” And when I went to grad school, and it was not for web design, it was for film, but they were media classes and multimedia classes, the professors were teaching shockwave director, and this is at a moment where it was clear that shockwave was already dead. And I was like, “what are you talking about CD ROMS now, this is 2002. CD-ROMs are not it, the web is it, we should be learning Flash, cuz at the time Flash was the deal, right, and so I pushed really hard to say you should stop teaching director and you should be teaching flash instead, and by the time I graduated five years later, those classes had all switched to flash, and I was like “NO! We should.....it’s 2007, Flash is dead, you should not” So there’s like this lag when it comes to the technical skills, I think, that may or may not be a solvable problem

Leslie

I think it comes back to structure, right? So accredited schools a lot of times it takes two or three years to make a single change in the catalog. The staff, the faculty, don’t usually get a lot of support including resources for continued professional development it’s not because they don’t want it, it’s because the budget have been just slashed at schools, right? So how do they keep up to date with things? It’s like this whole huge, it’s not anything, there’s no silver bullet to make this all better, but it’s one of the reasons Jared and I are really changing the structure of the school that we’re creating. So we’re creating a user experience design school for…to create industry ready graduates, and it’s a two-year program it’s called Center Centre. Other people might have heard of The Unicorn Institute, that was its code name, and now that’s kind of the research project part of the school which is Center Centre. And we’re changing the structure so that students can really learn what they need to learn in the environment they need to learn it in the timeframe that they need to learn it to be able to be useful to hiring companies. One hiring companies will be much happier we believe with the graduates that we’re producing because we’re making sure that the students really learn both the soft interpersonal skills and the hard technical skills that hiring managers want and students I think when they graduate are going to be really excited to go and get meaningful jobs and we’re not creating senior designers and creative directors, what we’re creating are really good junior designers. Really strong generalists. And we’re changing the structure so that we don’t have that two-year, that three-year lag. Actually our facilitators will be getting continued professional development every three weeks for two-day industry grade workshops with our industry’s greatest leaders.

Jen

Wow.

Leslie

And so our faculty will be up to date and taking these classes with partner companies and with students all at once and working with the industry’s brightest and best. And that to me is what probably needs to change and it’s really hard to change that in a traditional academic environment, and that’s one of the reasons I ended up leaving an academic environment that was traditional, even though I had more support, the most people I’d ever, ever, heard stories about from at the school I was at, and with my department head, it’s still the structure wasn’t allowing me to take the students where I knew they needed to go and they wanted to go.

Jen

Huh. So you’re gonna have a lot of group project kind of work? Or?

Leslie

Yeah, 75% of our program’s project-based learning, some of them are individual projects for students to learn individually, just because we know that sometimes in group projects, if you’re inclined to be a more of a visual designer, and someone else is a front end developer, that you might never get to be the opposite of what your natural abilities or what you already know. So we want to make students have the abilities to really push themselves with individual mastery projects that are guided by the facilitators and connected back into those industry grade workshops, but then after that the students actually, so the classes are three weeks long, and they’re broken up into three different parts a two day industry grade workshop, the three days individual mastery projects, and we’ll really meet the students where they are with their individualized learning, and then two weeks of the class are on real world team projects that either come from community non-profits, and we’re raising funds for students to actually be able to work with real local non-profits, it’s pretty exciting stuff. So that they understand the entire process from concept to completion, like totally building out, working with professional developers to build these systems out, and then there’s also school projects and there’s also company projects where students work with professional corporations to work on their usually probably backburner in house projects to really come up with great solutions and then work with the company’s team to build them out so again so the students don’t’ just make something that looks pretty, or this might work, they actually have to work through the whole process with developers to make sure that what they design is actually able to be produced, and doing that the students get to learn how to communicate with different kinds of people, different stakeholders, different kinds of organizational structures, they get to understand agile, waterfall, and agile-ish, and whatever the in-betweens of all those are, and they get to learn how to work with developers and understand that they are part of the team and how to have really great respectful conversations with people that might be coming at the project in a little bit different way.

Jen

Yeah, that’s nice. And it sounds like clients as well, I mean that’s the other thing that students frequently don’t have a chance to have any experience with is when the client is not you. And you need to talk to someone and work together. You know your client has opinions about what it is they’re hiring you to build so you need to work with them to come up with something they’re going to like instead of just something that you like

Leslie

Well it does turn out that clients have opinions, huh? It’s one of those things that you have to learn to handle, right?

Jen

Yeah.

Leslie

And what’s great is that our facilitators are gonna be able to push the pause button on these projects, and ask, “Ok how did that meeting go with the client, and what did we learn from it, how is that going to change our approach in the future, how can this be done better in the future, and those kind of moments are just so key. And to really have this guided learning experience, I think it’s one of the most exciting things about what we’re doing.

Jen

Yeah, cuz frequently we each have just stumbled, many of us, all of us perhaps, we stumbled our way through that process, and you feel very alone, and you’re like “Ah, man I went to that meeting with this client, and I liked them, and I just botched it, like they were getting upset and I got defensive, and I shouldn’t have been so defensive, and then they said no, and I didn’t want them to say no, and now we’re stuck” Like to have someone and come along and be like, “ok, let me help you understand how that meeting went. Let me talk to you about other strategies.”

Leslie

I mean, I would’ve loved that.

Jen

You could have said this or that, or you could have been like, “ahhhhhh”

Leslie

And then the next time you have a situation like that, because there’s always going to be a next time, you have a little bit more tools in your toolbox, you know, “Oh maybe if I said it this way,” Maybe if I just smiled, maybe if I didn’t talk until I was able to actually smile, that might be the way to go. Maybe I just say OK to this, ok, well let me think about it. You know a lot of junior designers don’t know that they can actually take time to get back to a client. And all the things that are real subtle, subtle communication skills.

Jen

Yeah

Leslie

That are really what separate out good designers from the best designers because good designers, and really the best designers have a lot of the same skill sets, where best designers really excel is in those communication skills, the soft skills, being able to facilitate meetings with people that maybe have never worked in a designer or a development space before, to be able to speak to things that are relevant to somebody that is maybe approaching this very much from a business perspective, or a marketing perspective, maybe things that you just really understand people’s language and the domain knowledge that they’re in and understanding all that, thos4ee are skills that take time to learn, you really don’t learn them necessarily just by reading, this come from a person, me, who reads all the time, but really they come through practice, the learn by doing is so, so important.

Jen

So what’s something that’s kinda surprising in your research as you’ve gone around talking to both schools and professors and talking to companies whoa re hiring people that that seems maybe different, I mean you know the classic irony, this is what I already know, all the schools are really bad, and all the companies are getting junior designers who don’t know what they’re doing. So….

Leslie

Well, I’m gonna make sure that everyone understands that I’m not saying that at all. I think actually so many programs are doing the best that they can, given their resources, and some programs are really great in different ways, what we’re doing with Center Centre is just taking a different approach, a project based approach, a little bit more of a holistic approach and you know we have the extra benefit of being able to structure this new from the very beginning, and so we’re not coming with a bunch of baggage, but I think there’s some amazing educators out there and there’s all kinds of different types of education popping up, we see different hack schools, and code academies, and you know we see online learning, and things like Tree House and all these things have a place and a part in our role in creating the next generation of web designers, web developers, UX professionals, I think it’s really important hat we all understand that there is a place for all of this and what we’re doing with Center Centre is really just filling a different kind of need, but I have a ton of respect for the different educators who every day get up and they really just figure out how are they gonna make the best of what they have and really help their students grow and learn. I mean there are people doing just amazing things with the most limited resources, and I have huge respect for that.

Jen

What are some of the trends that you see that you’re really pleased about that you think are good trends.

Leslie

You know, I think the biggest trend that I see that’s really neat is that designer education is something people are now talking about and it’s seeming sexy, cuz when I started looking at this stuff years and years and years ago, people didn’t’ want to talk about education, they wanted to know the latest css trick, or HTML thing, or whatever whatever whatever, but they didn’t’ want to know about education. And I kept thinking, “But this is the future, we have to teach other people bring them up and learn how to learn and share our knowledge” and it just wasn’t being looked at in the same way it is now. So I think one of the most exciting things happening is that we’re having conversations that are really great conversations, they have lots of meat and details to them, and we’re all trying to share our information that we’ve collected, our research, what have you been doing, let’s share this story, I’ll share my syllabus, like whatever resource we can, we’re all trying to share that. That to me is one of the biggest trends.

Jen

Yeah.

Leslie

Because that’s gonna lead to big change, and I don’t even think we know the implications of what these conversations. I don’t think we know exactly where it’s going to lead, and that’s pretty exciting.

Jen

And what do you thing, I mean, one of the things that we have not talked about that sort of under- over-lays all of this is at least in the US, it may be different in other countries, but at least in the United States, the funding for college education, university education, has been gutted over the last thirty years, very intentionally by political maneuvers that were made by certain particular people, to cut financial aid, to jack up student loan rates, to just make it more and more expensive to go to college, and a lot of people aren’t going, a lot of people are really questioning what’s the value, and meanwhile, then that means the schools themselves, their budgets are being slashed, they’ve lost a lot of their state funding, it’s harder and harder for them to run the schools, which is why they’ve jacked up tuition, and a lot of the sort of classic tenured professor positions where someone would go and get a job and get tenure and be there for their entire career and be quite well paid once they reached the pinnacle, reached the senior level professor job, those kinds of positions are disappearing and those are getting replaced by adjuncts who are making basically minimum wage, trying to scrap together a living with no hope of getting promoted, so it’s a very strange time, schools as a whole are having such a hard time and yet students cant’ afford to go, and are wondering maybe I will just go to General Assembly, maybe I will just get on Tree House, maybe I will just…

Leslie

Yeah, we are in a really, really weird space and time when it comes to education. So, all of the things you mentioned lead to this weirdness. It’s one of those things where if you asked me ten years ago, I’d say definitely go get your degree, that’s the only way you’re going to be able to get ahead, it doesn’t even matter what your education’s in, just go get your degree, right? Now I’m like, I don’t know if that’s the way to go. It’s sort of like really choose your education wisely so that you can get meaningful employment to be able to pay off student loans, or to be able to have really meaningful jobs, one of the wonderful things that’s happening, it’s wonderful, it’s also challenged, within for example the UX field is the field is growing so much and there’s so many job openings, so in the next 10 years it’s supposed to grow 22%, there’s already something like 23,000 job openings in the US right now and about 150,000 job listings, so somewhere in between there is the real number of job openings in the US alone, and so if you have the skills to be a UX person, this is a really good time and it’s gonna continue to be a really good time. There are degrees which make it a lot more difficult to get a great career, some of them that are more about being professors, which used to be totally fine because we had the systems to support that, but like you said, funding’s being cut and there’s more adjunct teachers at universities, and so there’s less need for people that are professors, and more need for people that are doing other kinds of work. And other more industry based jobs.

Jen

Yeah, you can’t really, well I shouldn’t say you can’t be a history major, I don’t believe that at all, but a person maybe in the past would be a history major and then they go get a history PhD, and then they become a history tenured professor.

Leslie

No I think you can do anything. Yeah.

Jen

That’s a much harder, it’s harder now these days to do that then it was. Yeah I’m a big, big, believer that people should just go major in anything they want, get themselves a great liberal arts from a well rounded education chase their passions, and then once they graduate, look up and go, “huh, I wonder what I wanna do next,”

Leslie

Yeah, I think it depends on where you are with yourself in your own understanding of what you want to be when you grow up, although it’s still a question most of us in our field tend to ask on a regular basis, even though if younger people consider us grown up, I think we, we’re always kinda challenging ourselves, what am I gonna do next? Which is kinda a fun thing about working with people in our field. But it is interesting to see different people in different places in their life. There’s a time to figure out who you are and what skills you need for that, and then there’s a time when you know what you want to do, and you really need very specific education. So in the US, we’re really lost our way when it comes to vocational and technical schools, somehow they became having a bad stigma, and what I love seeing is that changing now. And people going to be able to take two years of education and get a job right out of school and being able to work in an environment that is stable and is not working you to death all day all night you know it’s just a really neat thing to teach people skills, have them learn those skills, and be b able to use those skills right away.

Jen

Yeah!

Leslie

To me, that’s one of the trends that’s really neat.

Jen

Especially because there are so many people who are changing careers, they’re not 18 and looking to try to figure out what to do.

Leslie

Yep.

Jen

They’re in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and they’re wanting to get out of the career they’ve been in, and go into web because it’s so like you said, there are so many job openings and they pay well and it’s an exciting field to be in and it’s a lot of creativity and a lot of whatever it is that we’re doing for better or worse is affecting culture and society very deeply, and so I’ve known a lot of people who want to, and I’m sure there’s a lot of people listening right now who are in a transition like that, and looking for a place to get accelerated training that would be faster than basically teaching themselves on nights or weekends.

Leslie

Yeah, and we see that trend happening to a lot of career shifters, and this is a good time for it, there are a lot of different ways to teach yourself or get guided teaching, it depends on what your current skillsets are and what you need to round them out to get the job that you’re looking for. So there are a lot of different educational opportunities out there and I think that’s really exciting! Before you ask me if there was something that really, I think you asked if there’s something that really surprised me, when Jared and I had been talking about the different hiring managers, and one of the things that I realized and I knew this before, but it because so so clear talking to all these different companies, that there’s something that’s lacking in most programs, and it’s being able to build of course the soft skills, but also this idea of professional stamina, so when we’re talking with hiring managers, they were saying stuff like, “We often meet in a meeting for a half day or a whole day, and we can’t even get recent graduates who can sit through an hour long meeting and not look like they’re dying.”

Jen

Huh.

Leslie

Ok. This si something we really need to focus on in the structure of how we’re doing things.

Jen

That’s interesting.

Leslie

Yeah! And being able to have really focused work time that you can put two hours onto something, or eight hours onto something in a row and be able to really make that effective time and understanding how to schedule your time so that you are the most effective and all of that, that’s really a learned skill that you don’t usually learn until you’re on the job, so we thought why wait for that, that’s one of the reasons that this structure, this school is set up the way it is, because we’re really wanting students to have practice of professional stamina.

Jen

Huh. What other things are hiring managers looking for?

Leslie

Yeah, they’re looking for people that are tenacious and gritty, that are curious, that are self learners, that are…that are self learners, but are team oriented, they can work with a team, but they are self motivated to get going on things that they should just learn. Instead of their managers saying, “hey, you really need to learn this.” Managers like people to understand what they need to learn, say, “Oh, this is a thing that’s happening, maybe I should learn this, that really excites senior people when junior people go, “I see this trend happening, I’d like to spend some time on this.” That kind of thing really excites senior folks, which is cool. So those are some of the things, it’s mostly soft skills, the technical skills most hiring managers say of course hires need to understand the technical skills to get the job done, however as you mentioned before, technology, tools, they’re changing so much, and each company has their own set, and their own way of doing things, their own way of writing code and those things can be learned by a person who is really interested in life long learning, so they’re more looking for foundational knowledge in the technical skills, the proven ability, the past history, learning something that you didn’t know before but teaching it to yourself, and picking it up and how quickly do you pick it up and does that excite you or does it drain you, and if it excites you, that’s great for the team, or if it drains you, you might not be the right fit, those are some of the things that we’re seeing.

Jen

Yeah. That definitely seems like it…maybe 50 years from now, this will be different as web everything, web design, web development becomes more of a been there done that, been around forever, but on this first thirty years it feels very much like, and in part because there hasn’t been a traditional education system that’s come out of…that’s one of the best skills somebody can have is knowing how to teach yourself. Getting in there.

Leslie

Yeah, learning how to learn.

Jen

Yeah. Because yeah, you’re going to have learned less and know how to write CSS using Less and have just learned the crap out of that, and know it really well, and then you’re going to get a job where everybody’s like, “yeah, we don’t use Less, we use sass,” and you’re going to have to drop Less and go learn sass, and they may not expect you to know it that first day, so it’s ok if it takes you a couple weeks to really get your flow with it, but that ability to switch from one to the other is what’s really important, not necessarily that like, “oh you didn’t know sass, so we didn’t hire you”

Leslie

Yeah.

Jen

Like no, it’s fine that you knew CSS only, or use Less only. It seems that way at least.

Leslie

Yeah, how some of the job descriptions sorta don’t make sense, because it’s not really like you shouldn’t have to know all these things or this one specific thing, it’s more like, do you know how to learn.

Jen

Right. Well they’re like, “Ok you need 10 years of iOS experience.” It’s like, Uhhhhhh, iOS came out in 2007, and they didn’t open the api until 2008, it’s impossible to have ten years of iOS programming experience, so, who was the person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about right now. I think it’s the person who wrote the job description.”

Leslie

Which gets a little bit scary, but different companies have different way of moving that through the departments.

Jen

Usually there’s some kind of HR person involved

Leslie

Yep.

Jen

And there’s only two checkboxes, 10 years and 2 years, and the ten years box gets checked and who knows how that happened.

Leslie

Yeah, that’s one of the things we need to do a better job on is really understanding how to write job descriptions, how to go through the hiring process, how to really ask great questions in interviews when we’re looking for web designers and developers.

Jen

Ah, yeah.

Leslie

Like don’t ask me if I was going to be a kind of soup, what kind of soup would I be, like that doesn’t matter. If you are going to be an animal, like I don’t care. Like tell me about a time that you’re really proud of that you learned something that you didn’t know how to do before, and I don’t care if that is learning how to make soup, or sew something, or learn how to use a different framework, that almost doesn’t matter as much as what’s your process, and how did you learn it, and were you excited about that, and what happened at the end. That’s way more interesting that some of the other questions we think we all have people go through interviews. And they get and you’re like, “What? That doesn’t matter.”

Jen

Yeah.

Leslie

Let’s get to what matters and what matters is people’s past actions, their past behavior really show what their future actions and behaviors will probably be, so let’s ask questions about that.

Jen

Yeah. Yeah, do you think that these hiring managers are looking for degrees, do you think most care what, if someone’s gone to school or not, or accomplished this degree or not.

Leslie

So that is a really great question. What we found is that it varies. Most hiring managers themselves within UX or in design or in the web world don’t care. What happens is some of the larger companies, some of the HR departments there seems to be a requirement, but most of the companies Jared and I have talked with, the HR companies are willing to reassess that and basically make it more on the skills and the roles versus the degree. So it just right now, we are on this weird transitional period where yeah, some companies are either going to want a diploma or a degree, and then there’s other companies that could care less, but in then end they just want to see the proven ability to learn, the chops, you know like the skillsets.

Jen

Yeah.

Leslie

So there are plenty of jobs that aren’t looking for degrees at all and self-learned, self-taught is totally ok.

Jen

And it sounds like in there you’re saying that you might get, if you don’t have a certain degree, or if you’re not able to check off a certain skill box, you might get filtered out early in the job process, and so you might not make it to the…your resume might not make it to the desk of the person who’s actually going to be the boss of you, so that could be a problem,, but usually once you get to the people who are actually going to working, who are actually doing the hiring they don’t, it’s not nearly as important to them.

Leslie

Yeah, it really isn’t, and when you look at the way most people are hired, anyways in our field, it’s really who you know, the connections.

Jen

It seems so random.

Leslie

It’s like relationship building, right?

Jen

Yeah

Leslie

So if you are connected to the, if you’ve met the hiring manager before, and they want to bring you in, they’re gonna work with HR to make it work,

Jen

Right, right, they’ll tell HR that you’re coming, no the other way around.

Leslie

Yeah, and then there’s some companies that can, can’t, it’s sort of just depends right now. I think we’re in a time, I think it will all change in the next few years, and we’ll see less of you’ve got to have this many years and this degree and this thing, because people are not going to be able to find the talent because we have such a talent shortage, and they’re going to go for the things that really do matter. The willingness to learn, the skills, the proven history of being able to start from zero and get to a hundred.

Jen

Yeah I mean I asked some of that because I talk to people and they ask me for advice, and sometimes I see some people filter themselves out, they see a job description for a job they really want, but they’re nervous of course and they think, “Well, I don’t have that, or I don’t have this thing that they’re asking for,” and I think whenever we’re any one of us is looking for a job, those are just little tiny clues to agree that the universe is agreeing with you that you’re actually a really, really, horrible person and no one should ever talk to you again, you know?” It just reinforces our insecurities.

Leslie

It’s definitely a mind trip.

Jen

Yeah, but when you’re looking at someone else’s situation, it’s actually much easier to see that, “Oh, you know those things, that’s someone someone somewhere had on their list of to dos, I need to write a job description for this person that’s we’re trying to hire,” and they sat there for 45 minutes and they try to imagine the kind of person that they might want and maybe they even had a form where they had checkboxes to check off, and they just filled it out and they may or may not ever remember what it was they wrote in that job description and it may or may not actually be what they’re looking for.

Leslie

Yeah, there’s some really good resources for this, there’s a book called Hire with Your Head. If you’re a person writing a job description, I so highly recommend this, or if you’re going through the hiring process, as a person that is hiring, it’s a great book, it really talks about writing performance profiles and more of really telling a story of what people have accomplished versus, “you need to have already done this”, instead it’s “you will have done this in a year”. We’ve got an example up on our website for the school right now because we are going through the hiring process for two more facilitators, and so if y’all want to take a look at what that kind of process the outcome is, you can see what we’ve put on there, and it’s way more about, “Hey, in 2 ½ years, you’ve done these awesome amazing things.” And it gets really, really specific into those awesome amazing things, but it’s setting the stage for someone to be excited about working with your team. If you want someone that’s a life long learner, that doesn’t want to be super micromanaged, that you’ve got to write a job description that’s super exciting about it, especially in a field where the talent is limited and we’ve got way more jobs than people to fill them. So I think that’s a really good one, and if you’re looking for a job, the same author has just recently put out a new book, and I think it’s called Getting Hired. So it’s a really great book too, but it’s coming from the perspective of the person that’s looking for the job. So those are two resources I super highly recommend.

Jen

It looks like it’s The Essential Guide for Hiring and Getting Hired.

Leslie

Oh yeah, that’s it! Great! Yeah, it’s probably like a purpleish color? That’s what I remember. [Inaudible 45:49]

Jen

Yeah…I think this is it, I’m dropping links into the show notes. The show notes by the way you can go to 5by5.tv/webahead/71 and find the show notes for the show. Yeah, and so you know, make a pitch! You’re hiring faculty to teach at your school. And so if people are listening and they’re interested, they think this school sounds awesome and they want to teach there, they should go to centercentre.com, center the first one, this is tricky, center E R, centre R E.

Leslie

The Queen’s English comes second. So American English first, so yeah, it’s C E N T E R C E N T R E .com. and yeah, we’re hiring right now and our goal is to grow a whole bunch as we are moving forward, so we are going to be hiring lots of full time faculty as we move forward, and the full time faculty, it’s so cool they get to team teach with two other great people and work with a cohort of students for two years, so there’s really there’s great relationships being built, and I don’t know, we have a pretty fun and exciting, I think, environment, and so if people are interested, for sure, fill out the application, super simple application, and hopefully it’s interesting to a lot more people what we’ve heard is people just get so excited just reading the job description, and I think if more of us start writing job descriptions and really hiring in a way that makes our environment seem as much fun as it really is, then we’re going to get better candidates and it’s going to be less about you have to have 10 years when you can’t have 10 years in this, or you have to have a degree, it’s more about really hiring the right person with the right mindset and the right skillset to help round out your team

Jen

Well it also looks like you’re using this process as a company, you really have to have describe a vision of how you want this new hire to fit into your company, the kind of role they’re going to have, the kind of accomplishments that they make, and so someone looking for a job, you can look at that vision and see, “Yes, that is the kind of role I want to have, that is the kind of work I want to do.” Because I feel like surprisingly job descriptions do a terrible job of that, and sometimes there’s a bad match where the company hiring and the person taking the job actually have very different ideas about what that job is gonna be, and just coming back later and saying well you need to re-read the job description, and it’s like, well, but that doesn’t help at all, this is completely not…you hired this role and you didn’t want this role at all, you used this job title, but you don’t know what the job title means. Like it’s really easy to be a huge miscommunication, and this looks like…this kind of description looks like, yeah, you’re not gonna have that kind of miscommunication.

Leslie

Yeah and the job description actually comes from a performance profile and it takes, I’ll say this is not the easiest process, I think it’s the most effective, but it takes some time to really ask the hard questions, like what do we really need form this person on our team, and what area the major objectives that they will accomplish within a year, and what are the time frames, like what will they have done in the first month, you know what solid objectives come from that, those kind of things, and when you have that all written out, writing a really energized and fun job description, like a job ad, becomes a lot easier because you know what you want from their performance, and you can actually vive that to you candidates at some point, their top candidates, and make sure that you are on the same page, because if hiring when the….when the person hiring and the person being hired, when they’re not on the same page, that’s only going to lead to trouble down the line, right? So get all that super, super, transparent all the way up front, don’t hide the worst of what you’re doing. One of the things I think for the school that’s really challenging is that, I think it’s really exciting, but I think other people find it challenging, is we’re gonna have a really great framework set up, but we also know that we’re going to have an iterative process and we’re going to have to change things, so somebody that likes really, really, stable environments where nothing changes, this isn’t the right fit, and they should know that right at the beginning. Someone that’s super energized by being able to be a part of something new, but that’s being built to be sustainable long term, this is gonna be the right fit, and lets have those conversations way up front

Jen

Yeah.

Leslie

And make sure we’re getting the right hire and make sure the hire’s getting the right company

Jen

Yeah, yeah cuz it’s no fun when it happens the other way around.

Leslie

No! It’s no fun on either end, and it just wastes time for both parties

Jen

Wastes so much time

Leslie

Resources, everything, so you know I think if you put the effort up front, it really pays off in the long term you get a really amazing team which we do already have some full time folks at Center Centre and they’ve gone through this process and they’re amazing. We’re such a great team because we all knew what we were getting into at the beginning even though part of knowing it was that we didn’t know everything.

Jen

Right.

Leslie

That that was…you had to be ok with that.

Jen

So to catch people up if they’ve haven’t been following you and the Unicorn Institute initiative, you and Jared, I don’t know, had lunch or something, you got together, you came up with a master scheme, you did a bunch of research going to talk to these marketing managers, and then you launched this kickstarter campaign with a modest $21,000 goal, and reached $133,000 because people were like, “This is awesome!” And now what? If someone’s like already listening to this and saying, “I’m totally going to that school, where do I apply to be a student? What’s the timeline, where are you at, what’s happening?”

Leslie

Yeah, so that’s a great question. We are so working really hard to get our website up. We’re tying to get the content right, which is the fun thing to do. So we are really going at it really hard, and hopefully we will have it up in the next couple weeks for students to be able to apply. That’s the goal. With any project that could change. We are looking at opening the school up in the fall, probably late September for orientation. The first week of October, having classes start., and so all the things are kinda fluid, but we’re really working hard to get people to be able to apply because there’s so much interest in the school. If you go to unicorninstitute.com, you can actually sign up to be on our newsletter, and I promise you, you wont’ get a whole bunch because we haven’t been able to have the time to write as much content as we would like, because we’re writing all the other kinds of content. That’s the fun thing about being a small team; you’re always working on a million projects all at once.

Jen

Yeah, so people get the email and when the website launches people can find out about it

Leslie

Absolutely.

Jen

So what’s the deal? I mean it’s a two-year program?

Leslie

Yep.

Jen

Two year, is it an associates degree, is it more like a certificate degree, what kind of…and then where do people earn this in the cloud. What’s the deal with that?

Leslie

Ok, so it’s a two-year program that is a diploma in User Experience Design and Technology, that’s the official program title, and we are an authorized school, we are authorized by the state of Tennessee. It’s a physical bricks and mortar school and it’s in Chattanooga Tennessee. So at this point we’re not gonna have online classes, although we do plan on sharing resources that we find and information as we go along but the students that are taking part in the two year program will be needing to be in Chattanooga Tennessee, and so will the facilitators, and Chattanooga is a pretty amazing place, and I have lived and travelled all over the world and Chattanooga’s my favorite place, I will say that. And when I’m away, I always feel like I’m missing Chattanooga because it’s pretty and the people are nice, and there’s just a lot of potential here. You feel like you can come here because it’s a mid-sized city in the south and you can just roll up your sleeves and get involved in projects. We say we’re a project-based school for projects based city. That’s how Chattanoogans know how to do things, they know how to get together and make projects and make the community stronger through those projects.

Jen

And you have really fast internet there, don’t you?

Leslie

We have the fastest. Yeah, we have one gig down, simultaneous, and that is not from google, that’s actually from our electric power board, our local municipality, who an number of years ago, really didn’t know exactly what we’d all od with a gig, I think we’re still all trying to figure that out, but decided that that would be really great infrastructure for the citizens of our community, and we’ve seen a lot of business growth from it, and we’re really all working on trying to make sure there’s not a digital divide, and so like our community centers and our rec centers, our libraries are all being wired up with the gigabit capabilities so that you can be of any means and still have access to really fast internet and the tools that come along with it. And our library’s pretty darn awesome. We’ve got 3-D printers that you can use for free just by having a library card, and if you’ve got a library card in Chattanooga you get Tree House membership for free so there’s all these kinds of partnerships

Jen

Wow.

Leslie

Yeah, it’s pretty neat. So Chattanooga’s pretty awesome.

Jen

I mean it’s funny…it’s a little bit of a trivia haha to say, “oh you have the fastest internet,” but to me that means, like, that didn’t happen by accident, that happened because the politicians and the city itself wne tfor it, like they made a decision and somehow they’re hip to something good, cuz that’s one of the dangers of moving into that, not dangers, but one of the downsides of moving into a more rural area…the great thing’s so many of us work online, you really could live anywhere so it’s like, why don’t I go live in the mountains, it’s like, “Oh because there’s no internet in the mountains in these particular areas, there’s only satellite and satellite is super expensive and slow whatever whatever.” Or, “Ok, I can move here where I can get DSL or cable, really slow cable,” but cable and you end up feeling like you’re living in a place where there’ s not a lot of synergy around the fact that the internet is a big deal and a lot of the economy is moving on the internet. Where place like, to see a town like Chattanooga say, “Now this is really important we’re gonna get really fast internet and then we’re going to provide it to every citizen, and then we’re going to have things like 3-D printers at the library, like that means that the whole entire area is aware and into it and that’s something kinda great.

Leslie

It pretty much, it’s like mind blowing you know I live 1,790 feet above sea level my ears pop twice when I come up to the house from, I work from Chattanooga downtown in the valley and I come up the mountain and I have one gig up one gig down at the house and that’s cool. It was actually really practical I think during the kickstarter, my computer did like a super kernel panic, one of those things.

Jen

Uhuh.

Leslie

You know you’re like, “Oh no, this is not a good time for this,” not that any time’s good, but this is really bad, and I was on the phone with the apple care person, she’s just like “Oh it’s gonna take you hours, you have to like download the entire operating system and you’re going to have to install it, it’s going to take you hours.” And I’m like, “Really?” She’s like, “at least four” and then she stopped, because I was like, “Really? Really?” cuz I can’t really afford this, and then she goes, “wait, what’s your internet speed?” and I said, “Well, one gig down, one gig up, and she goes, [Jen laughs] “you’ll be fine, everything’s gonna be ok, it’ll be yeah no problem.” And she was totally right. Within I think about thirty minutes, it might have been twenty three, it was a really short time, I had downloaded the operating system reinstalled it on my computer, everything was fine and that just, that’s one of the ways, I’m like this is really practical.

Jen

Yeah. It’s crazy. Nice. So the whole thing is in Chattanooga.

Leslie

Yeah.

Jen

And because you wanted to in person teams and projects and you want to learn human, how to, how to be in person with humans and you gotta do that in person.

Leslie

Yeah, you gotta actually practice it and one of the great things about Chattanooga is as you’ve mentioned, Chattanoogans get it, like our local foundations so we’ve got old Coca Cola money here, and they put money back into the community on a regular basis and the kind of programs they’ve been supporting are things like kid code camp kinda things, and they support what we’re doing with the school and they understand the value of projects and the connections between community industry and education. And I’ve just been solidly working in these spaces for years and years and years, and these private/public partnerships are just so incredibly valuable and people go, “Why Chattanooga?” and I’m all, “Just come visit and you’ll understand.” Because not only is it beautiful but the people here, they have a lot of language that web people use that designers use that user experience people use, and people that don’t have that language have the understanding, it’s sort of like innate into the DNA of the city which is really cool.

Jen

Huh. And you said it’s, you’ve gotten what is it, auth? The…

Leslie

Authorized?

Jen

Yeah, authorized, or, hmm, can’t remember the other word. What’s the deal with that? You were telling me before the show that a lot of people ask you about that.

Leslie

Yeah so one of the things we really wanted to get right was being authorized to be an actual real school, and we had to go through a really long authorization process, although we were able to do it a lot quicker than anticipated, we took us about a year and we had to submit 13 inches of binders full of papers to become an authorized school.. And the state basically makes sure that the program that we are intending to provide meets criteria that are basically they’re to really protect students. Making sure that we have a sustainable business model, making sure that we are doing everything to be transparent and open and honest and equal. So all the things Jared and I and the entire Center Centre believe in, but it’s really cool that the state believes in those too and are really looking after the students, so the state has deemed us as worthy of students and that we will continue to be working with the state they will make sure that we are keeping all the promises we make. And that’s one of the, I think really neat thing that’s for us, that some of the maybe shorter term programs haven’t really gone through in the same way. Now some of them have, but some of them haven’t. What we are authorized by the state and the state is watching out for students, so not only are Jared and I and our team watching out for students, but there’s a third party making sure that everything we do is on the up and up that we are sustainable, that the students come first, that learning is really at the center of everything that we’re doing. And so It’s really neat that students and people that we hire know that they’re coming into something that is real and that’s gonna be here a long time.

Jen

Yeah, I think part of it, right? There must have been a hundred years ago or something some situation where people were just sort of popping up with schools that were scams or disappearing, or you know there’s Harvard, oh there’s Princeton, oh there’s some jerry Somebody’s school that actually was not a school, I don’t know, cuz we ended up with this system of getting authorized or certified or whatever it’s called, and being an official school versus being kinda like, not, an official school. It makes me think of things like, “Oh that makes your degree worth more because people know that you’re from a school that’s like a real school.” I don’t know, some ideas I think are old and really, like we were discussing about what a hiring manager’s actually looking for in a job, I don’t know that, I think reputation on Twitter is probably more important than whether or not you have an authorization hanging on the wall, but…

Leslie

Yeah, I guess the difference, though, cuz I believe what you just said is truly true, except when you’re looking for a school, you kinda what to know that they’re going to be there to finish up your education.

Jen

Right!

Leslie

You know, it’s a two year program, you want to know that they have planned correctly, that they’re still gonna be in business in two years.

Jen

Yeah. Well then even better you want them to be in business in ten years

Leslie

Exactly!

Jen

so that there’s a legacy and there’s other alumni, and there’s a connection, and there’s a connection and the school’s still there.

Leslie

And you want to make sure that’ you’re not getting taken advantage of.

Jen

Yeah.

Leslie

What we’ve seen, and not even just a hundred years ago, even more recently there’s just seen a lot of fly by night schools that have taken advantage of citizens including veterans which has been very heartbreaking to see. To see people being promised and guaranteed jobs and, yeah if you see a school saying that they guarantee you a job afterwards, like absolutely 100% guarantee, there’s, they probably haven’t gone through an accreditation or an authorization process cuz those kind of guarantees by most states are not actually allowed.

Jen

Ah. Red flag.

Leslie

So that’s one of things, we’re not going to guarantee you, yeah, we’re not going to guarantee that you get a job, but we are going to work super hard to make sure you are the best opportunities.

Jen

Well plus you can’t, nobody can guarantee.

Leslie

I know!

Jen

I mean, you can promise connections.

Leslie

Absolutely. We can promise really amazing--

Jen

You can promise chances to meet with people, recruiters or whatever, help with your portfolio, but you can’t promise that you’ll get a job.

Leslie

Yeah, and that kinda stuff is what people, you know they’re putting there hopes and their dreams and their money on those kind of promises, and it’s just not fair, so one of the things I think that’s great about the authorization problem, process, is that you learn, don’t make these false promises

Jen

Mmm, right.

Leslie

Only promise things that you can deliver.

Jen

Yeah. It comes from decades of experience of people, centuries of experience of these big schools getting run in a certain way. What, so let me ask, what about money, do you know how much tuition be, will there be financial aid? Is it the same kind of classic situations that a university or college might provide in the way of assistance or what could people expect?

Leslie

Yeah, we’re working really hard right now, actually Jared was in town on Friday, we’re meeting…we met with a community foundation. We’ve got this great community foundation here in Chattanooga, and they’re going to actually be running our scholarship fund, and so people that students that have need, we’re going to have support, and so we’re working out all those details right now, about all that information of course will be rolled out when we, when we roll out the website, so we’re still working on getting scholarship monies together. We’ve got some big exciting news to come out soon, as soon as we get permission to go public with sit. So we’ve got things happening and we’re really working the best that we can to make this really affordable. One of the cool—I keep saying one of the coolest—I really love what we’re doing if you haven’t noticed. But I think it’s really near that we’re going with the all inclusive tuition model, so besides things like housing or your clothes or your own health insurance, those kind of things, we are actually including computer and all the software and all the post its notes you need and we always say design can’t happen without post it notes. The pens and notebooks that you need, all the books, so like students aren’t going to get dinged with, “ok here’s this fee and that fee.” No, it’s like a set price, all inclusive, you know exactly what you’re getting into and during the two years that you’re in the program, it doesn’t go up, so you know exactly what you pay the first year is what you pay the second year, there’s no, there’s no weird shadiness happening. Cuz you get some of these schools where you might start off at like $2,000 for a year, and then like $20,00 worth of fees on top of it. Which is crazy.

Jen

Mmm.

Leslie

We’re not like that. It’s just everyone’s gonna know what they’re getting up front, and it’s super transparent, and then we’ll do our best to really create ways for students with need to be able to afford the school, because we want a super diverse group of people We all work with a lot of different kinds of people throughout the day, and with different projects, and what really creates great teams is diversity, so we want to make sure that we are making we’re bringing in different people, different backgrounds, different experiences, to really have some really great balance teams.

Jen

Nice. Yeah, I mean there’s been a lot of discussion, thankfully, finally about gender and all the sexism in the tech industry, it seems like every week there’s another story or three, but the thing we haven’t really been talking about much is race. And how super white our industry is. And I think a lot of that happens, it has to do with the economics, and it has to do with access to a computer, and the kind of schools that people are able to go to as a kid, into high school, into college, and what’s available, the quality of the education available at certain colleges versus other colleges, and just sort of you know, do you, it’s kinda like a middle class thing to have a computer and be able to hang out in the bedroom when you’re ten years old and mess around with this stuff and not have to have a job the moment you turn 14, and not have to be like, actually helping your parents pay rent by the time you’re 16, and having those kinds of obligations early on makes it harder to just kind of mess around and teach yourself this stuff on the side.

Leslie

Yeah, I think that’s what’s really important for all of us that are in a place where we can share resources, whether that be money or time or computer or going into a school and working with young kinds or with high schoolers, people that might not have the same advantageous that either we have or we wish we had when we were their age. You know it’s really important for all of us to continue to consider, how do we give back to really move our industry forward

Jen

Yeah, and sometimes just being able to afford books is the difference between whether someone is able to get the most of their education or not, you know. It happens too often that somebody has the tuition money, but they can’t really, they’re not really taking the class because they couldn’t afford any of the textbooks.

Leslie

Yeah. And those are the things that really need to be looked at and resources need to be found to help people reach their potential. So we all probably can do our part on that and it’s really impossible for any one of us to fix all the challenges when it c comes to education or money or unbalanced teams, or any of that, but I think each of us can take what we’re really passionate about, what we have the skillsets for, what…you know and just sort of tackle those things, and if we’re all doing that, then hopefully we’re all kind of coming at things in a little bit different way, giving resources to different groups and different people, and different kinds of resources, and then we actually start really making a difference, and I see that happening al lot already within our community, which is community being like web design and UX and web development Those communities too. In Chattanooga, we have that definitely going on on a local community level as well, and I think the more that we all can do to raise awareness and then to give what we can, then we have a chance of really kind of you know minimizing a digital divide and a class divide and making things just a little better for all of us.

Jen

Yeah and I think it will be very interesting to see, especially once your school opens, but also it’s just part of the trend of what’s happening right now is to see, because you are right there are amazing professors all over the place.

Leslie

Yeah!

Jen

And there are great programs at other school where there is actually a a whole curricula and a whole stack of faculty that are doing really amazing work, so it’ll be very interesting to see, because I think a part of the problem, at least part of the problem that I experienced was that the web kind of came out of nowhere, and schools weren’t really sure what to do with it, they weren’t really sure, so you had the art school kind of create, “Ok well now the art schools have typography classes and they’re teaching a little bit of user experience design, and they’re teaching web typography, they teaching web [inaudible] and Photoshop, but they aren’t really teaching, they aren’t really connected to the computer science department because the computer science department and the art department have not been hanging out in the last 50 years.

Leslie

And that’s the thing, just trying to find them.

Jen

Yeah, there’s sort of like these web classes sort of stuck on the side of the real programming program. Or When I was at temple university they made a decision to kind of not have a web program and not have a web department, but to make it be a cross, make those classes be kind of like a cross departmental specialty, that you could be part of because they were saying, you know in the, at that time, the way the university was structured, there was a whole school of communication s and that included advertising, it included journalism, it included film and media arts, it included a bunch of other stuff, and it was right next door to the theater department, and so they were like, “well, but journalism needs to switch to the web and advertising needs to switch to thinking about the web, and television it was broadcasting, television broadcasting, journalism needs to switch to thinking about online presence, and that’s true, absolutely that’s true, so all of those departments needed to kind of switch over and revamp their curriculum given the changing realities of all thse different media, but at thte same time there was this gap and I don’t know if they’ve now changed their mind to fix it, not fix it bust shifted things around the art school moved in, and all this details I don’t need to go into, but the, it just even that simple thing, do we create a department for the web or not, it seems like…

Leslie

And how do you handle the interdisciplinary challenges.

Jen

Yeah!

Leslie

And the politics of it all,

Jen

Yeah, yeah.

Leslie

And one of the things I found really useful when I was at UTC, was the librarians. The librarians are like an, I don’t know specifically within UTC, but I’ve met amazing librarians from all over, its like if you go to the library department, you work with the people there, it’s not as political, because they’re there to help and be connected to every department. And library sciences really focus on UX and UI.

Jen

Yes! and content and taxonomy

Leslie

Yes!

Jen

I really love taxonomy!

Leslie

Yeah, and they’re

Jen

They’re really good at it.

Leslie

They’re doing it on a regular basis. They’re really good at it. And they’re smart and they’re nice, and they like to read. And so these are all things that I find really great qualities in people. And so it made really great connections with the people in the library. And that I think if you’re, if you’re a professor, and you’re like “I don’t even know where to start,” that might be a place to go. I know I worked really hard to like work with the business entrepreneurship professor and computer science professors when I was there, but you have to have these professors that are just so engaged and so willing to take the risk of connecting with other departments and a lot of places, it’s risky, and it also, it’s not necessarily considered in your evaluations as a positive thing, so it’s again, it comes back to that structure, so it’ll be interesting to see how things kind of play out over the next few years, and hopefully some of the things that keep students from getting the best education that they could dissolve and people can come together to create amazing programs.

Jen

Are there places where professors can connect with each other and share curricula ideas and syllabuses, syllabi, and tips and rants about how frustrated they are or strategies, I mean, are there sort of behind the scenes places where a lot of the great work that is being done is being shared?

Leslie

Well, you’ve got things like Chronicle Hire Education where people are sharing stuff; it’s not all together just focused on the web. We used to have a, you know when we had the web standards project, we had the web standards project educational task force, where a lot of that was happening, and Interact curriculum, and a lot of that is still accessible online, but isn’t it’s not active. I think it has been taken on by the W3C, but I haven’t been seeing as much of that going on and that could just be because my head’s been so getting the school to be a able to get running, so those might be places to look, probably the W3c and seeing what’s being shared there and if you know if things aren’t happening to and you want them to happen, it’s like step up and start getting people excited and start sharing. Take a step towards sharing and other people probably share back. Super, super, traditional academic professionals will often, at least for me, they would say, “I can’t believe you’re sharing your syllabus for people. That is your content. You shouldn’t be sharing.” And that’s not the way I am, you know I’m built to “hey…I’ve figured this thing out, and you might want to use it, or maybe not, but here, have at it. And if you come up with something, share it with me please. “ And I feel like that’s how we move education forwards, that’s how we move industry forward, that mindset isn’t held by everyone. But I think the more that we can share, the better off we all are. And so what you’ll see a lot coming from probably mix of the schools and the Unicorn Institute, it’s really just all of us sharing, all of our team sharing what we find and our resources and what our research is and hopefully people find sustainable continue sharing that.

Jen

Nice. Well that’s for coming out and talking about all these things with us. People can follow you on Twitter @jenseninman is your twitter username, yeah?

Leslie

Yes. No hyphen.

Jen

I always feel like it’s so close to Jen Simmons.

Leslie

I know, it its. I keep seeing our names come up in stack, you know, wait no, that’s not me.

Jen

Yeah, cuz Jen Simmons in my first name and last name, but frequently it sort of gets smushed together into one word, and then Jenson Inman is your two last names hyphenated, but not in your twitter handle, so it’s Jenson in one name and Inman is the other name, so it’s @jensimmons, but I have a hard time saying it because it’s so close.

Leslie

Oh that’s funny! Yeah, it’s just @jensimmons, but it does sound when you say it that fast, it really does come across very close.

Jen

Yeah, if you say them really fast. I’ve actually had people say to me, like thinking that I was you or something because the names are similar enough. Like no, we’re different people, we just have the same food allergies

Leslie

Seriously. I don’t know many people with the same food allergies for those of you listening, we do have some crazy food allergies and so Jen and I can actually go and have lunch together and both feel like sane

Jen

Normal people!

Leslie

I’m not a freak right now. We’re both a freak together, that means we’re normal!

Jen

Yes, it’s quite nice.

Leslie

Well I look forward to the next time we are able to see each other and share a meal without all the things that would kill us.

Jen

Right, well yes. Yes. It’s yeah, cuz it would kill you a little…People can follow on Twitter @jensimmons, and they can follow the show @thewebahead, you must have a Center Centre Twitter, what’s the Center Centre twitter?

Leslie

Actually, right now, I think we do, but I…we’re mostly tweeting from @UnicornInstitut, without the ‘e’ cuz that’s just too long.

Jen

@UnicornInstitut without the ‘e’..

Leslie

Without the ‘e’.

Jen

Cool. What else do I need to talk about? Pimp? I don’t think anything. I think that’s good enough. Oh! Media Temple. That’s what I need to do, thank our sponsor. Media Temple, Who’s actually been really awesome all year 2014, so far, and totally supporting the show, so thank you to them. And we’ll talk to you next time. Whatever? Do a show for you to listen to next time.