{"id":242,"date":"2005-09-20T11:30:50","date_gmt":"2005-09-20T18:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/?p=242"},"modified":"2005-11-01T00:59:10","modified_gmt":"2005-11-01T07:59:10","slug":"classes-and-more-classes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/2005\/09\/20\/classes-and-more-classes\/","title":{"rendered":"Classes and More Classes"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was one class shy of getting my Master of Fine Arts degree when I left SCAD<\/a> to join a startup in 2000. That’s a decision I would later at least partially regret, mostly because my mom has nagged me just about every other time we speak. This year I decided to get the degree over with once and for all.<\/p>\n

As my luck would have it, it turned out I’d been orphaned in my own major. Because of the rapid changes in the computer arts industry, SCAD<\/a> had to specialize Computer Art into four distinctive majors (Animation, Visual Effects, Interactive Design and Game Development, Broadcast Design and Motion Graphics). Based on my industry experience, they decided I belonged to Interactive Design and Game Development. A professor painstakingly correlated all the relevant courses from way back when to the standards today and found that I still need to take one class in addition to thesis… The class turned out to be “Human-Centered Interactive Design”. <\/p>\n

Perfect! I’ve always wanted to sharpen up my user interface design skills. And besides, good UI design is a cross discipline skill — everything we use and operate today has some kind of user interface design element in it. <\/p>\n

The best part about this is that the class is also available online, something SCAD has been talking about doing for years but finally got it going. I logged on to the elearning system (run by Blackboard<\/a>) and was horrified… because I’d miss one week worth of work already… <\/p>\n

On top of the catch up work I have to do from SCAD, I also need to attend to the two classes I already registered at UC Santa Cruz (database class and unix administration class), both of which are pretty heavy on reading and labs. Add to all this, Bryan has been a handful… This is going to be a tough quarter to get through.<\/p>\n

Speaking of UI design, the professor made three books as required reading, which later I found out are bibles among UI design books:<\/p>\n