26/07/05
In the beginning... -
Categories:
Started another semester at university. I have 6 times as much class as i did last semester!!! making a total of 6 hours :)
Doing 3 internal subjects, ITC382 (Client Server Applications), ITC555 (Networking and Security), ITC307 (Software Development Project, no set classes for this), and a distance subject ITC262 (Operating Systems, also no set classes). Have had 2 lectures for one subject so far for ITC382. Ken (the lecturer) describes the subject as a "shell" allowing us to choose much of the content ourselves, while staying within a broad common framework.
Currently reading a book lent to me by one of the international students who have just arrived (a great group of people from the US, Canada, France, and a few others). Braden, who is writing a paper on "The Economics of Happiness" has lent me "The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less (How the culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction)" by Barry Schwarts, in which he makes the point that university's have become "intellectual shopping malls", where once there were set structures and subjects that exposed students to common subjects that taught the student students how "to live a good and ethical life". Something Ken has mentioned (the ACS (and similar organisations) requires members to be competent in ethics, communication, and project management, as well as their core element of computing, and thus our course should be designed to reflect this, whereas there is currently only one subject on each (excepting communication, which is theoretically covered in every subject)).
Something i have discovered talking to the international students from the US and Canada, is the value they place in becoming "well rounded individuals". Their course structure reflects this, with all students doing subjects such as history, photography and philosophy, regardless of their major.
Back on topic, started reading through the requirements of the first assignment today, I think it just confused me. As part of this assignment though, we must keep a learning journal. Ken in class has recommended doing this in the form of an on-line blog. I have contemplated in the past keeping a blog, but generally passed it off as a waste of time. I understand it would serve as a useful record of my experiences, and perhaps more useful, a log of what i have learned, and how i have solved various problems (i often spend some time re-solving problems because i cant remember how i did it last time). I already have 2 forms of this in part, both less demanding of my time. One is Slogger, a firefox plug-in that automatically saves every web page you visit. Along with Aduna Autofocus which allows me to search the huge amounts of data (5Gb since Jan 1st 2005), it serves as a useful "subset" of the Internet, a collection of everything i have seen/read.
The second is that I also communicate daily with my best friend from home via IM (Yahoo typically). The logs of those conversations contain conversations about daily problems, we send each other links of interesting web pages, and so the logs are a most valuable resource.
Seeing as it seems strongly recommended to use a blog, i will treat it as a trial, as well as keeping a learning journal for the subject, i will also attempt to keep a personal blog for the duration of the subject, to see if it is worth the few minutes a day to write. I only know one other person (Katrina Tolentino) who keeps a regular blog. Many friends doing multimedia here in Wagga were required to keep a blog for one of their subjects, but none that i know of continued after they completed the subject.
Seeing as there is a possibility that i will use this blog after finishing my course, i have set up my own blog on my server, in preference to using the service provided on the ISPG server.
I have also (last night) installed Debian Linux on my test machine (with a little help from Clayton with the graphics settings). An operating system that used to have a reputation for being "hard core", and complex to install and configure, the new version does almost everything for you, and the synaptic package manager allows you to install a huge library of software from the two dvds. I will attempt to get my php editing environment running on the system (XAMPP, Eclipse and TruStudio). It should help me bridge the gap between windows and linux
It also occurs to me if i am going to be writing these blogs i need to find myself a spell checking plugin for Mozilla Firefox.
Comments:
No Comments for this post yet...
This post has 200 feedbacks awaiting moderation...
Leave a comment:
Trackback address for this post:
http://blog.peacocktech.com/htsrv/trackback.php/24
Trackbacks:
No Trackbacks for this post yet...
This post has 200 feedbacks awaiting moderation...
RSS Feed