Let me start this blog entry off by saying that I hate how texty it is. I also don’t like how chunked it is, or more accurately, perhaps, isn’t.
Today I dropped CSC 554 (Human-Computer Interaction) and added COM 487 (Internet & Society).
At 4:30 today, I attended Internet & Society for the first time. It was the second class for most people, as it started on Monday, but there were a few other people who had added it since Monday attending for the first time as well.
Dr. Adriana de Souza e Silva is quite personable, and I already like her teaching style. I’m thinking of sending her an e-mail to ask what she’d like to be called. I hope it’s either Adriana (though, I don’t actually like calling professors with doctorates by their first names), or Dr. de Souza. If it’s, “Dr. de Souza e Silva,” that’s going to get long each time.
Class started with a quick review of the syllabus, which she had already gone over at Monday’s class, just to cover the essentials with the new folks. After class she took a picture of the new people with her digital camera, and added us to the web page with everyone else already on it.
We had two group activities during class, both involving discussion. I generally hate these things, but decided that so does everyone else, so I took the lead for our group (the room was split in half), and acted as the note-taker and presenter of our conclusions.
The first discussion involved each half of the room describing, textually, the difference between Cyberspace and the Internet. The second exercise was to describe the difference between each graphically.
In the second exercise, I attempted to draw, which is never good. Fortunately no people were involved, so no stick men. And fortunately it wasn’t a game of Pictionary.
I felt infinitely more competent and comfortable in this class than I did in CSC 554, and I’m glad I made the change. Though, I’m not sure when it comes to education, that comfortable is necessarily better.
Dancing was okay tonight. We learned a new dance, which was quite difficult. The printout Carl had of it listed it as an “Advanced” dance, though he and Adam billed it as an “Intermediate” one.
I think the fact that, by the end of it, there were only two people left might have meant that it is an advanced dance. Just a gut feel, though.
I didn’t really like the dance, but learned it anyway. The other thing I don’t like is that we have only the name of the song to which to do the dance, not the name of the dance itself. At least that was my understanding about, “Corina, Corina.”
Learning this dance made me think about how I like routine. I like dances I already know, especially once they are rote.
I almost always don’t like dances when we first learn them, but, most of them, I end up liking just fine. Hopefully that will be the case with this one, too. I really hate that ridiculous twist at the end of it, though.
| Hate is such a strong word. |