How to use this site

The best way in, however, may well be what people identify for themselves that they want to know about: having met immediate needs they may then explore links to contextualise their new knowledge. I have tried to use the navigation links on the left to point you to things which are linked.

If you want to use the site to learn about teaching more systematically, though:

1. Look at the major headings listed below: each of them will open in a new window so you can switch back to here with no trouble (this page will be displayed as a separate instance of your browser on the taskbar at the bottom of your screen in Windows 9x).
              
2. Ignore the hyperlinks as you go through the introductory stuff under each heading.
               
3. When you have been through everything at this level, you can start to dig deeper and follow links to see where they take you. Some of them jump across headings, because as with any professional practice, every bit of teaching relates to every other bit—and I have had to restrain myself on the number of cross-links. I hope that this process will enable you to "stitch" ideas from one place to ideas elsewhere, and I have a fantasy that in this way we can reproduce in some small measure the kind of conversation we might have in a class. If we were in a live class, I should be hoping to encourage reflective practice by making these kinds of links (which is why some of my classes seem like a series of digressions piled upon digressions — there is method in my madness).

So this page is designed to work as a sort of Advance Organiser, or scaffolding, for the rest of the site. (You'll find references to those elsewhere, but it's not appropriate to insert links from here.)

1. Curriculum
       
2. Methods
        
3. Media
       
4. Assessment
         

Quick notes on the site design

These are included not because I claim to any expertise in site design, but because it is a form of presentation, if not of real teaching, and so it has some relevance.

I take seriously the research on usability (see Jakob Nielsen's work at http://www.useit.com/) so some of the ideas come from there: in particular —

• Not using frames: The downside of frames is that you can't bookmark directly to a page (unless you know about right-clicking and opening in a new window).            
• Only computer hobbyists tend to up-date their browsers, so I am sticking to fairly conservative features
               
• The use only of relevant graphics: that is to speed up download times. This page should load in about 5 seconds.

I also have a few ideas of my own, which may be nonsense, but I'll stick with them until someone shows that they are not:

• The pages have a (light) coloured background to cut down contrast. The contrast ratio of a conventional monitor, using transmitted light (from behind the screen) may be (I'm guessing) about 30:1. That of ordinary paper (using reflected light) is only about 4:1. I am convinced that trying to read large chunks of text from a glowing white screen is hard on the eyes.
          
• Similarly. I have gone for a sans-serif typeface (Verdana for preference, with Arial/Helvetica as a second choice). Monitors are still pretty low definition compared with proper print, and I find serifs distracting — they look "spidery" on screen.

Finally, my apologies to dyslexic readers. I have recently (since completing most of the site) come across some material which suggests that in-text links and type effects such as bold, make life even more difficult for them than normal. As you will see, I have used them, but fairly sparingly. I hope it is not sufficient to deny anyone access.