I was just talking to Zach Hale about what we're each taking this semester and I figured a few of you might be interested in the coursework I'm pursuing. Zach's doing an Informatics major so he was telling me about his cool database class dealing with JSP, Tomcat and PostgreSQL. I'm taking 4 classes this semester:
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LCC3206 - Communication & Culture
Students will conduct individual and group studies of such digital forms as: blogs, vlogs, MMOs (Second Life), social computing sites (MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube, etc.), pervasive computing and gaming, and other manifestations of remix culture.
We talked about Wikipedia in-depth today, and on the first day the professor took pictures of the class with his cameraphone. Enough said.
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LCC2720 - Principles of Visual Design Everything from learning the basics of hand drawing to working with InDesign, Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver as well as a focus on typography.
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CS2340 - Objects & Design An intense, group-oriented computer science course teaching object-oriented design and programming through the SmallTalk language. Justin is one of my group members.
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CS4803 - Computational Journalism Another interesting class, higher-level with many grad students - next week a guy from CNN is coming in to speak with us. The professor talked about digg for a while on Tuesday... I think I'm going to enjoy this class.
In this class we will explore themes such as (a) storytelling in the context of news, (b) sense-making from diverse news information sources, (c) the impact of more and cheaper networked sensors (d) collaborative human models for information aggregation and sense-making, (e) mashups and the use of programming in journalism, (f) the impact of mobile computing and data gathering, (g) computational approaches to information quality, (h) data mining for personalization and aggregation, (i) authoring and broadcasting, and (j) citizen journalism.
This class only meets on Tuesday (for 3 hours), so I don't have class on Thursday. It's also held in the Tech Square Research Building, which is a great facility.
- Update: I'll be helping out with Georgia Tech's Solar Decathalon as a web intern of sorts.
As I mentioned in my new year's post, I'm only taking a few classes so I can stay focused and do well, while allowing time for this blog and a side-project that I'm rather enthusiastic about. For the students reading this, what classes are you taking?