Where
are we headed?
Today Angela and I (faculty) met with our Advisory Board—representatives from the industry—to try to figure out what skills, aptitudes, etc. students should have when they complete our program in Interactive Media.
We started with each person writing ideas, both general and specific, on sticky notes. Then as a group we organized these into big categories. Smaller teams of two or three took each category and tried to synthesize all the individual comments into one over-arching objective.
Peter Babula from BlueRobot and I got the "General skills" grouping. I was encouraged when he stressed the importance of storytelling and emotion as fundamental components of interactive design work. Angela and I (and other faculty) have been stressing this for the past several years. It was good to hear someone from the industry reinforce this.
How to accomplish this is, of course, another thing. The goal of a session like this is to make sure that what we're doing on the academic side makes sense in terms of what students are expected to know/do "out there" in the world.
Now we have to look at our curriculum and see that it deals with the needs identified here. There were issues that came up today that make me tired just thinking about how to tackle them.
TOP
Here
today, gone tomorrow
Today's high of 80 degrees was a record, warm enough that we took our class outside rather than staying in the stuffy computer lab. It was 78 as I drove home around 6:30.
Over
the next few days that's all supposed to change as it drops to the 30s with
snow on Thursday or Friday.
The clouds in the western sky as I walked to the parking lot looked pretty ominous. The sun was still there, in that bright spot between them, but it looked like it was struggling to hold its own.
Not sure what's going to happen to all the spring flowers, but it can't be good.