10 Years of Writing HTML Tutorial

Sometime recently we passed another milestone in the 10th year of continuous web presence by our Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction.

In Spring of 1994 we were doing support for faculty at South Mountain Community College in helping them get started with a local “center” for teaching, learning, and technology– we had convinced the college to donate space for an “Educational Technology Center”, a small room in the back of the library (now realized as robust, staffed, and established Teaching and Learning Center located in the Computer Commons).

We dragged down a few computers, publicized some workshops in the Spring of 2004. most of them lightly attended. I had been using HTML for a few months, and thought it could be a great way for faculty to create hyperlinked multimedia content, especially since it could be tossed on a little old floppy disk. Se in creating a workshop on basic HTML, it made sense to actually do it as a web site….

Wow, look at that fancy logo- the little Mosaic browser logo, defty done drop shadows (the old way in channels in PhotoShop 3.0)… Anyhow, as you can see in a later snapshot of this stone age web page, we ran through 8 lessons of basic HTML headers, paragraphs, lists, images, hyperlinks– and this has all nicely evolved into the current version with now 30 lessons (which is overdue for an overhaul into teaching CSS, some day….) and translated into Spanish, French, Italian, and even Icelandic.

We’ve gotten lots of mileage from the “Volcano” tutorial ( the HTML lessons are a building series of tasks culminating in a web site about Volcanoes), more than 3400 email messages of feedback, and a few arrive almost every day, form just about every internet domain you can think of.

Ten years and still clickin’

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