Class Summary, Sept 20

This assignment is about what I learned in class on September 20, 2007 (last Thursday).

In this class period we started out by talking about online classes. Next year, some web design courses at CSUMB will be available online. The plan is to make the courses available every semester, but to trade off so that they're available in a classroom one semester, and available online the next semester. This would also probably make the materials easier to update for the next semester, since the materials for each course don't have to be updated for the Fall->Spring date shift, just the 2007->2008 date shift. This is a small thing, but it'd be a whole lot less work for somebody.

There are about 70 web design courses being offered right now, and they plan to do this with 10 of them initially, and see how it works out. CSUMB's goal is to have 12k students, and have 4k of those take classes online only.

We moved into time and stress management. The general conclusion was that we should prioritize school over work, because the average salary almost doubles for people with degrees.

Convey's Time/Task Management Matrix was mentioned. It doesn't sound too useful to me, but here it is.

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Crises Pressing Problems Deadline-Driven Projects	Prevention Planning Relationship Building Research
Not Important	Interruptions Email Phone Calls Meetings	Trivia Busy Work Time Wasters Pleasant Activities

We went into more detail about time management, but I'd rather talk about the speakers. Bobbi Long, Mike Machado, and Ken Wanderman talked to us today. Well, I'm not sure if Bobbi talked to us. I think she had a class she had to be in. She does graphic design though, mostly posters and logos.

Mike works in the ITCD lab, teaches the Intro to UNIX class, and is part of an ad-hoc network research group. He's also the guy to talk to if we're in the Tmac program and want some software. CSUMB has a deal with Microsoft to let us use most of their products for free. Unfortunately, Microsoft Office isn't part of this deal. Ahh well. Mike also to us about MySpace, a personal storage server each of us can get access to if we email him about getting an account. I don't think this is useful for storage - it's only 600MB, flash drives are cheap these days, and most things can be uploaded to Gmail. It will be useful for my programming projects later on. It has PHP and MySQP set up, so once I learn about those things I can put up demonstration pages on my MySpace.

Ken deals with the M in Tmac - the multimedia. It's called "interactive media" these days, but the concept is the same. It involves video, text, moving images, and, most importantly, interactivity. There are a lot of uses for multimedia - instruction, gaming, recreation, advertising, social interaction, etc. All you need are web design skills, some programming, and graphic design ability. Writing skills help too; I've seen tons of advertisements on the web that I wouldn't admit to making, had I made them. People who can work in this area are highly sought after, especially for flash animation.