Introduction

The Spiders at Work Web Camp was held from July 31 to August 4, 2000 at Marlboro College in Brattleboro, VT. 20 participants attended for a week of intensive training on various topics oriented around the task of developing and bringing to completion a web-based project to serve as a resource for adult educators and/or their learners.

The official Spiders at Work site may be found at http://hub1.worlded.org/spiders/.

The workshop and training was sponsored by the Literacy Assistance Center of New York City and the New England Literacy Resource Center at World Education, in partnership with the Adult Literacy Resource Institute of Boston, Vermont Adult Learning, and the Graduate Center of Marlboro College.

The training lasted five days, during which we covered a great deal of material, beginning with the mechanics of authoring HTML, proceeding to learning about various multimedia types and how to incorporate them into web projects, considering more advanced topics such as CGI scripting and programming, and concluding with project-management strategies to help ensure that projects began get completed.

I was the lead trainer for the week; this documentation is the result of my starting with audio recordings made of many of the sessions, fleshing them out more completely, and revisiting and revising topics as I felt they were warranted. I didn't intend to write documentation this extensive when I started, but it grew on me. I will continue to update it over time as needed; please report inaccuracies, questions, complaints or lavish praise and contract offers to me at steve@silicongoblin.com.