| dc.description.abstract | The World Wide Web technology was developed in the early nineties. Since then it has had a great impact on society, and its use has expanded beyond the research communities where it was first adopted.
The theme for this thesis is the skills and professional knowledge necessary to create web sites. Three established professions have different approaches to the task: computer professionals, graphic designers and information professions. Some new job titles have also emerged for occupational groups creating web sites: web designers, webmasters and information architects. Discussions in newspapers and on Internet newsgroups show that there is no consensus on how web sites should be designed.
This thesis explores how the task of creating web sites is interpreted in Norwegian educational institutions in 1999/2000. 12 case studies are conducted. In Norway, professional higher education is located in the university colleges. Established study programmes in computer science, graphic arts engineering, visual communication and information science are included in the study. Emerging private courses in web design, webmaster and information design are also included.
Andrew Abbott's (1988) theory of the system of professions is used to analyse the rhetoric and strategies among the educational institutions. The central term in Abbott's theory is jurisdiction, which means the link between an occupation and its work. Each profession is bound to a set of tasks by ties of jurisdiction. Web technology is viewed as an external disturbance to the system of professions, opening new task areas of jurisdiction. According to the theory, environing professions and new groups contest for achieving jurisdiction over the new tasks. In this study, the environing professions are computer professions, graphic professions and information professions. New groups are web designers, webmasters and information designers.
The tasks of professions are human problems amenable to expert service. Professional practice has three parts: (1) To diagnose, i.e. to classify the problem, (2) to infer, i.e. to reason about the problem, and (3) to treat, i.e. to take action on the problem. Each profession has a unique abstract knowledge system being taught in colleges and used in professional inference.
A conclusion is that there is no unifying definition of the term web designer in the different courses being taught. A webmaster is easier to define, but the courses are nearly identical to traditional computer studies.
Five different diagnoses to the problem of creating web sites have been identified in the case studies from the university colleges. The diagnosis reduces the new problem to a version of a profession's already secure jurisdiction. The different diagnoses are linked to very different abstract knowledge systems being taught, as can be seen in the curricula at the colleges.
There are two main areas where the different study programmes differ:
1. Is the skill and knowledge of HTML and mark-up languages commodified in computer tools?
2. What is the best analogy to the web user interface? | nor |