Intro Night

So tonight was the first class for the Introduction to Online Communities. It's being taught by Cory Ondrejka, Karen North, and Clinton Schaff. Talk about big names, experience, and know-how. We had an Orientation the previous Friday, and the awe of how diverse our cohort is in terms of backgrounds (journalism, web/tv production - even occupational therapy and karate!) spilled over into tonight's class. It does, though, makes sense to me that this program would draw people from all types of sectors because online appears to becoming the new universal language for communities. The potential of this group and program is enormous.

We also had Andrew Schrock do a brief overview of the Technologies for Online Communities class. And although initially I thought I would opt out of this class due to my bachelor's degree in computer engineering and background in digital arts, after going through the syllabus it appears that this would be a great refresher class. The internet and technology is constantly changing and updating itself. If you want to be in this industry you're going to need to know the most recent information.

One of the odd things I'm finding out is that there's a lot things that I come into contact on a daily basis in my work for the Institute that actually have formal terms, language, and protocol. For example, since I'm a go-between with the client and developers, with the client being the Director, head honcho, final decision maker person, I find there's a big challenge of having a creative front end with a strong back end to support it because there's only so much time for development due to hard deadlines. I guess this can be seen as the content vs. platform issue. The Institute has great ideas for what they want in terms of look, tools, etc. The challenge comes in implementing all that in an efficient way through programming. And with each new page that is added, each new tool and database that needs to be created, means having to do all of this and have it not affect the user experience in a bad way (slow loading pages, errors, etc.). BTW, the term user experience is another example of something I've been talking about and describing for such a long time and never knew the right term for it. Weird that I never knew the term; Cool that I finally learned it.

I also do a lot of brainstorming, mock-ups, meeting with developers, and bug/user interface testing when working on the Institute websites. And it looks like this will be more formally explained in the technologies class. So I guess I'm looking forward to learning how to do my current job with the Institute better and in way that will make me more versatile with future clients.

And the Recap: Intro class - good, Cohort - cool people, Techonologies class - looking forward to it.