Class Summary, Sept 13

This assignment is about what I learned in class on September 13, 2007 (last Thursday).

We had two speakers today: Andrew Coyle and Pat Watson. Andrew's specialty is designing dynamic websites. He says that most websites these days are database-driven, and I think that's true for "big" websites. John Doe's fan page for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie isn't backed by PHP and MySQL, but all of those web 2.0 sites we talked about in the 300L class surely are. Andrew suggested we read magazines, blogs, and newsletters to keep up with what's happening in the tech world. I think that's a great idea; a lot of the conversation starters I know are from Gmail's Web Clips. He specifically recommended the e-newsletter Good Morning, Silicon Valley, and I've added it to my Gmail's Web Clips. It should provide some interesting information.

Pat Watson is on the digital art side of computers. He showed us some examples of digital media from others' classwork. He says forensic visualization is a good field to get into. I've heard that before, and it makes sense. A visualization of a crime scene is a powerful thing, because a lawyer can use it to explain to the jury how a crime happened. It is common knowledge that visual aids help with that kind of thing, but 3d visualizations are much more helpful because they can be manipulated and pictures can be taken from other angles. Justice isn't the only field improved by 3d visualization, there are many others. Medical procedures benefit greatly from 3d models, both for the doctors as they work, and for medical students to better understand the situations they'll be facing.

Pat also told us visualizations are useful for 3d tours. He showed us a 3d tour of the future library, and it looked very impressive. Some realtors put up 3d tours of houses instead of inviting buyers to come see them. I don't think I'd like such a tour, because I'd rather see the house myself and look for problems. Still, a 3d tour would give me a good idea of what a house is like, and it would probably make me more interested than I would be otherwise.

Eric Clinger also spent a few minutes talking about our Individualized Learning Plans. He's going to go over those with us in 1-on-1 meetings. We all signed up for such a meeting. We can also drop in if we have any problems/questions/updates concerning our ILPs, but if we're going to take more than 10 minutes of his time we should schedule a meeting.

Interesting (and unplanned) fact: excluding this sentence, this class summary has the same word count as the last one.