Work…

Opera, one of the web browsers that has regularly enjoyed a notable amount of marketshare since the 90s (dare I say, since before the turn of the century), has since made a commitment to address accessibility and web standards issues throughout recent years. One of their latest projects is the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. Conceived to be a resource for instructors, students, and working professionals, the project attempts to make available a curriculum that includes a survey of the history of the internet, and an introduction to current, standards-compliant practices in web development.

The project is still underway, but the materials that have been completed are already available on the project site. In the end, they say there will be over 50 articles – all available under the Creative Commons Attribution, Non Commercial – Share Alike 2.5 license. I’ve reviewed the content and it is sound. It also attempts to give users access to a community they hope will form around the curriculum by way of a forum. As of right now, activity in the forum has been sparse, but to be fair, it IS new.

Most important, this effort attempts to address common inconsistencies in web development curricula across institutions where course material can sometimes lag a few generations behind due to the rapidly changing nature of the internet. I won’t go into the details of why this happens. There is enough material there for a whole other article.

While scanning the news this morning I encountered an article from the Edmonton Sun that mentioned Dr. Greg Newby, one of our faculty here at UAF, and Project Gutenberg. Dr. Newby the Chief Scientist at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center had worked with us a few months back exploring Second Life for visualization of real-world data.

So what is Project Gutenberg?

“Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.”

There are currently over 25,000 books available to read (free) through the project and over 100,000 available through their partners and affiliates. What I didn’t get from that article was an actual link to Project Gutenberg. There is a top 100 list available too if you’re looking for some recomendations.