Time Management

            These sites certainly have a lot of interesting things to say about time management but I’ve never really found time management to work as a viable approach for me.  I’ve tried structuring my time in a very rigid nature, blocking out everything I need to do and when I should do it but there’s something about putting things into a schedule I almost instinctively turn against.  Maybe it’s the way having a strict schedule makes the assignments and responsibilities seem more like work or chores than they already are causes me to want to procrastinate more, or maybe it’s that I don’t like any kind of order imposed on my life but I tend to do my best scheduling work when I play things by ear, letting work flow from me as it will instead of trying to force it.  Unlike some people I know I tend to rely very heavily on my right brain, the creative side of the brain that governs imagination, obviously I’m not incapable of using my logic and intelligence (I am trying for a math minor) but I think my right side is the dominate one in terms of just how I act and what motivates me.  In that respect it makes sense that I tend to be more inclined towards free form work instead of rigid structure, I mean you can’t force creativity or creative energy and that’s what it feels like when sit down for “scheduled work time” on a given project, I can chip away at it but I have no real energy or imperative to accomplish anything. 

Learning Journal 4: Pat Watson

I thought that today’s presentation from Pat Watson was an absolute delight, Pat is an amazing teacher and I always relish the chance to enjoy his presentation.  He’s got a real personal style and flair for public speaking that either really jives with you or really doesn’t.  Even Pat himself will tell you that he’s the kind of teacher that doesn’t really have a middle ground when you get down to it, people either love him or they don’t and to their credit I can see why.  This is my second semester working under Pat Watson while definitely working much ore closely; in spring 2013 I had him for 3D character and environment modeling of characters and this semester he’s both running my Multimedia class and my internship working with the Monterey Historical museum and I’ve found he has a very unique teaching style that I would describe as intense if but for the negative connotations that word has.  The thing about Pat’s approach that I like is how little hand holding there is, he’s certainly willing to help but if he’s assessed you to have the skills to accomplish a task he won’t micromanage you or give you step-by-step instructions, just the command to go forth and accomplish.  I see why others don’t like this approach though, you end up seriously out on a limb and you have to take a lot of your own initiative but I think people tend to misinterpret his sink or swim attitude as dismissive, which is not the case.  I’ve always got the impression that if Pat Watson says “okay now just go do it” that is him saying “I believe in you to accomplish this without my help, you got this.” And I find that to be very encouraging. 

Project Management

Going over the project management material I was initially struck at the staggering degree of carelessness with the youtube video, which was completely unavailable when I tried to review it.  After which I turned my attentions to the interactive presentation, which I found overall to be flawed at best.  The design of the presentation was ultimately poor and made very lackluster use of the visual cues and elements built into the video.  At the same time the material being covered was far too broad trying to answer questions like “what is a project?” which no self respecting sane person would really need answered by an interactive video slide. 

Learning Journal 3: Degree Learning Paths

         Having carefully examined all the possible degree pathways provided by the ITCD website I’ve decided that I really don’t like the sound of any of these really boring, drawn out, programming degrees.  I mean the computer-programming world is already thoroughly clogged with computer science bachelors who are being run out of a job by the folks in China or India, okay I don’t actually know that as a researched fact but this is also my research journal informed by my opinions and perceptions of the world so I’ll say what I liked and post what I like.  No I feel the masters in instructional technology would be a far better fit for me, partially because it would allow me to graduate with the skills to do 3D modeling for simulations and presentations, a very well paid freelance position that is thoroughly in demand due to the low number of modelers out there, and partially because that’s what an adviser suggested I go into, the same advisor who said I should take this course.  I’ve always been very skeevy towards programming, especially disliking the arrogant, smug, sense of superiority that seems almost endemic to most programmers who seem to think the ability to bash out some functional lines of code have made them into Doctor Manhattan.  It’s the same thinking that condemns Mac but praises PC, ignoring the fact that it was Mac’s unique and striking visual design and streamlined easy to use interface that helped popularize personal computing to the point that independent programmers can make millions by designing apps and random start-up internet companies.  Did I have a point I was working towards here? I think it was that I don’t like programming and I don’t care for most programmers which is why I’d rather take the more secure career path of 3D modeler. 

Learning Journal 2: Studying Ourselves

Study practice has always been a bit of a tricky subject for me.  I understand the need to study but the method by which I do has been an ever shifting and evolving process as I struggle to determine what manner of studying is truly effective for myself.  Initially for the longest time I didn’t even understand the concept of studying, it was like a foreign idea to me, a strange alternate occurrence that only happened to other people.  I just couldn’t wrap my head around the process.  It wasn’t until I was studying at a community college level that I finally clicked into understanding the process of it, the idea of repetition and even then I found simply reading, and re-reading, and re-reading material really wasn’t that conducive to my learning and applying the subject matter in an actual test setting.  When I came to CSUMB I eventually found what helped me most in studying was mock quizzes and worksheets, large lists of problems I could attempt as many times as I needed to understand the process behind getting an answer to a question rather than simply memorizing the information.  I feel that’s something not emphasized enough when it comes to studying, that the important thing to learn is the process more than just the random nuggets of knowledge, after all learning the process makes something universally applicable as opposed to something that can only help you in the brief instance of a test or quiz and becomes locked into a very limited and specific scenario. 

Learning Portfolios Review

http://itcdland.csumb.edu/~miniguez/#Core

This is overall a pretty good CD/CSIT learning portfolio though still not exactly great.  I give it credit for having some very impressive examples of the person’s work and the design of the portfolio is at least ambitious but it’s also thoroughly amateur.  It doesn’t feel like I’m looking at someone’s professional portfolio  so much as I am just looking at a student project, if this was my site I wouldn’t spread it around.  I think my big problem is that god awful big picture stamp right in the upper right corner, it just looks wrong and off and doesn’t exactly jive with the overall aesthetic of the page.  The visual design of the portfolio feels like it’s a funducation page about the American revolution from a local museum in Connecticut that didn’t have a ton of money to spend on the page and they blew most of it registering a domain name.  Maybe the big human face focus could work if this was meant to showcase Miguel’s comedy talent as a designer, sort of like the cover of Weird Al’s mandatory fun but as is it just looks slapdash and non-committal, like he couldn’t decided between being bland and generic or cheap and tonally confused so he combined both. 

http://itcdland.csumb.edu/~hhampton/ILP/digitaldesign.html

This is just bland as far as portfolios go, and I mean blander than bland, I’m talking eating plain crackers with nothing on them and following it up with some tap water and plain white bread untoasted.  The color design seems like it should work all playing off a combination of ice tones and sea foam but it creates this very blended look that makes the page looks far too vast and empty, like the text are just little freckles of activity in this blank and pitiless environment.  I like some of the examples of work like the T-shirts and the trip wise brochure all look very nice, especially the brochure, which, if I didn’t know better, I’d have actually thought was a real in use thing.  Mainly though my take away was that there seems to be a rule that says all project must be intensely boring because if I didn’t actively have the web portfolios up at this moment I probably couldn’t tell you about any of them despite having spent a good 8 minutes going through the entire site.  They’re just all very milk toast and general, I suppose that’s the point, that these are jobs and business portfolios because the best use of your time at school is designing milk toast examples of your skill to impress local businesses.  I don’t know maybe it’s just me but there’s really very little here I’d feel proud of if I had made them, I’d be proud of the money I’d earned from doing them I suppose but not the end product itself, I get that not every design project needs to reinvent the wheel but shouldn’t you want to showcase the projects where you did reinvent the wheel?  Again I suppose you could throw up the big disclaimer of this is just a means to an end, the end being getting hired but that can’t be a goal in and of itself, there’s got to be more to it than that.  I suppose it’s possible both of these people just have the ultra-simplistic life goal of find job and don’t starve, enjoying the simple pleasures of consumable media and gainful employment but that just strikes me as an intensely unfulfilling lifestyle, no one should obsess over just getting hired and making enough money to eat because with that mindset you aren’t living you’re just existing. 

Learning Journal 1: ITCD Presentation and What I Learned

What I learned from the presentation today was that design work sounds really boring, I'm sorry but it does.  I appreciate a good font choice just as much as the next person which is why I decided to post this learning journal in comic sans, it's the most fun of all the fonts I find and I'm sure everyone agrees with me on this, it was the font used in such critically acclaimed works as Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns and those list on the New York Times best seller list and frequently appear on lists of best or most influential graphic novels of all time, to say nothing of having been adapted into big budget films, one of which (Dark Knight Rises) is in the exclusive club of films to make more than a billion dollars which seems like a hard thing to argue with.  I don’t know I suppose there’s something to the elements of color balance which seems kind of interesting but I don’t think that’s really worth a degree or even classes, all the stuff I know about color balance I’ve learned from my own research and gut feeling, that feeling of personal aesthetics.  If there was a key lesson that’s applicable to everyone though it’s about communication, specifically that clients will always be terrible at it, after all if they were good at communicating thoughts and ideas they wouldn’t be hiring someone else to design something to communicate thoughts and ideas for them.  Also that map of Silicon Valley was some sobering stuff regarding the realization that the software business has somehow created a tense land grab even though basically everything about the product exists in a virtual environment and could be done from anywhere with a strong internet connection.