Class Summary, Sept 6

This assignment is about what I learned in class on September 6, 2007 (last Thursday).

We had three speakers today: Rosalie Strong, Kevin Cahill, and Young JoonByun. Rosalie's specialty is Instructional Design, which means designing the training modules that are used to teach people things. She has designed training modules for all kinds of things, from school topics to working with nuclear reactors. She's the person we should go to if our Capstone is about solving educational/training problems, developing new skills, or changing behaviors.

Kevin Cahill is a website designer and a nature lover. I think his hobby works well with his profession; both involve art. He's the guy to go to for anything about websites. I personally might visit him if I have website-design-related questions outside of class, since it looks like he knows how websites work from the inside as well as the outside. He talked about making websites look the same across different browsers, and I know that's a huge problem in the world of web design. I know the field well enough to know that he really knows his stuff.


The third presenter was Young JoonByun, and I think it odd that his last name is two names concatenated. He talked about programming. His presentation was definitely the least flashy, but I don't think that made it boring. I want to work in the field of programming, so his experience is probably most relevant to me.

Both Kevin and Young talked about something besides their work here, which I thought was interesting. Kevin said we should all take a nutrition class. That's weird, but it makes sense in a way. I took a health class in my previous college, and it had some very good info. Young talked about the new Computer Science major opening up, and I'm quite happy he did. For one thing, I'd heard about it before, but Young clarified its purpose. For another, this tells me that Young is a great guy to talk to if you're interested in programming - he'll tell you useful things that you probably didn't know.

Lastly, I learned how to start a blog on Blogger. That was a small part of the class, but I think it was important. I knew I didn't know how to do it before I went up there, and I knew I'd fumble with it and probably be pointed in the right direction by my classmates. Eric told us that anybody could start a blog with 5-15 minutes trial and error. I was trying to be the example of that.