My new job…
I have been going to school now at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (Online) for almost three years. I expect to finish classes in February of 2010 and begin life as a college graduate. If you don’t know me, I am 41 years old and have been attempting to get a college degree for over 20 years now but life has gotten in the way of my success up till now.
I live in a small town and there are not many opportunities to get local web development jobs so I have kind of resolved to putting out my freelance shingle and trying to market myself online as much as possible. Last month, a friend of mine gave me an opportunity to work part time for the City of Moscow, Idaho as a web developer. I jumped at the chance.
The job really requires a lot of people skills so I spent the first couple of weeks trying to figure out how to do that. Again, for the last three years, I have been going to school online and my people skills have certainly not been tested much in this last third of a decade. For the record, I have always thought I had pretty good people skills but I think they got a little rusty during my online education.
One of the things that kind of tripped me up was having to figure out a good pace for the job. I had been greeted with a pile of backlogged tasks and I immediately began making those updates. Much of this was just cutting and pasting content but there were some needs for the creation of new pages. Currently the site does not have a CMS and there is a lot of legacy code so there are a lot of room for errors to be made if the necessary attention to detail is missing. This backlog was in addition to the primary task of updating the current site’s design (someone else’s, I am just implementing it with more modern code) so I was a little distracted.
People get a little angry with you when you screw up their web pages.
This brings me to the next point, there are just about 150 employees of the City of Moscow and each of them carries just as much importance as the other (although there are a few of them who carry a little more importance because of their position). I now cannot just easily calculate the necessary time to complete a task because I often have 150 different schedules to work around and the occasional side task that needs to be completed simply because of its time sensitive nature.
Overall, I think my education prepared me pretty well for this job. I really enjoy it and I come home tired but satisfied because I can quantify what I did during the day and over time. I am really grateful for the chance to gain some actual work experience and I am eager to see what the future holds for me at the City of Moscow. Frankly though, I believe a strictly online education was not able to prepare me for actually working with clients. I am glad that I had life experiences to fall back on in order to ground myself. For current and future students in online only programs, I have a little advice. Get out of the house every once in a while and talk to real people. Volunteer for your favorite charity. Get a part time job as a delivery person. Do any thing to get yourself some experience dealing with other people and their needs. People skills are unspoken requirements for just about any job and they are hard to quantify but you will most certainly regret not having them when you graduate and begin looking for work.
My two sons…
This post is a little late but my second son, Max, was born on Feb. 19. As you can see, his brother, Jake, is very happy to have a little brother and even a month later, is still pretty proud of his big brother status.
Jake is going to be 7 years old in a couple of days and he is an amazing kid. I marvel at how much I have forgotten about babies in the last 7 years and I can’t possibly figure out how Jake got where he is now because I am pretty sure we did everything wrong as parents when he was born.
Anyway, we are all pretty happy to have Max in our family and we can’t wait to see what an amazing kid he will turn into (as well as the continued development of his big brother).
Creative Commons can fight Orphaned Works
Just last week Joi Ito, the CEO of Creative Commons made this post to his blog. In his post, he summarizes the decision by Creative Commons to explore the idea of creating a copyright registry as part of its services.
Mr Ito describes the copyright registry as being a reaction to the Orphan Works (and here) bills recently (re)introduced in Congress. Although there is already a process of registering copyrights through the government, Creative Commons believes that “because of our experience with machine readable licenses, metadata and creating a global network of compatible license, we believe that we can add value to design and possibly the operation of such a registry system.”
Ito also discusses their decision to make this a paid service, stating that he feels it will create “a more rigorous expectation on both sides of a quality of service and responsiveness.” He does acknowledge that Creative Commons benefits from its established base of users and contributors who use the service because of being free and states that he is “acutely aware of the necessity to stay focused on the core mission of providing free and open licensing tools. . .” Ito goes on to say that in order to continue providing their current level of service at no charge, there is a need to provide additional fee-based services that will generate the income necessary to keep the company economically sound.
I found this viewpoint interesting because is very closely related to one of the topics I have been discussing in my Media Law class at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online. I feel that this is a logical progression for the Creative Commons and would definitely find this to be a valuable service. My reasoning is this: I prefer to get a lot of my stock images from Flickr as opposed to paying for stock images. The images are usually just as good as stock images and they are very easy to find because everything in the Flickr database is based on metadata. The Flickr search engine also allows me to do a search just for Creative Commons images. It is a very painless process for me to find the exact image I want within seconds and I am positive that I have not violated any copyrights in the process. Images are not the only thing available with Creative Commons licenses and everything is already very easily searchable. The extension of creating a copyright registry just makes sense because it would ensure that your work could be found with a very simple search. This would be an excellent, visible addition to the government registry in my opinion because of the built in recognition it would inherit from Creative Commons.
Now the ideal situation would be for the Orphaned Works bills to die in Congress as they have done in the past. The problem is that this issue keeps coming back and does not show any signs of permanently dying. Eventually, it will pass and we all could lose the protection of our works. Artists, writers, and other creators would benefit from the creation of a Creative Commons copyright registry, as long as the fee structuring is kept at a modest price. Now I have heard arguments against commercial copyright registries because they (the arguers) feel this is akin to “Corporate Theft” but I think this is a terribly naive argument that is just like saying “why should I have to pay to put a deadbolt on my door, people should just respect my space.” This is a much different world than it was 50 years ago and that argument does not cut it in today’s world where theft (digital or otherwise) is so rampant. The protection of the registry will be well worth the money spent, in my opinion.
Jim
Tags: creativecommons, copyright, orphaned works, congress,
Future Help for Art Institute Online Students
I have been noticing a few things in my first year and a half at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online (AIPO). There are times when a certain piece of information would have come in handy. I have an advisor but I rarely talk to her. I get the obligatory emails that tell me about the new Campus Commons or to remind me about Student Services but I rarely get any real unsolicited advice about how to prepare for classes or which classes I will really need to buckle down on.
Now if you are unfamiliar with how The AIPO works, there are four 11-week quarters in the year with breaks in between each. The quarters are broken down into 5 ½ week sessions with two classes each. The first session follows a standard Monday thru Sunday schedule but ends in the middle of a week and then the second session takes right off and follows a Thursday thru Wednesday schedule. This can be very confusing for my family and makes it difficult to plan ahead for trips or other events but it is doable.
The classes are structured such that the first assignment of the week is generally a couple of discussion questions based on the readings and these generally need to be two to three paragraph responses to get full credit. As these are “discussion questions,” participation in discussions is also required to get full credit. Depending on the type of class, you may have some tutorials to do for a second assignment or some kind of “Web Quest” where you find an article on the Internet that pertains to the coursework and do a short review of the article. A third assignment will generally be directed at the final project (either a design plan, storyboards, prototype, or some other crucial step of the project). And, yes, there is a final project that needs constant attention during the class as these are supposed to be portfolio quality projects. This structure is pretty much standard for each class although there can be some deviation depending on the class type (the general requirement classes are less about design and more about reading and writing).
Now here is where the advisor would come in handy. I generally have no way of finding about each of my classes ahead of time (like how much work load there will be or what the class is even about sometimes). At a regular brick and mortar school, I would usually have more contact with upperclassmen (or women) and have an idea about what to expect from certain classes or certain instructors. Given this information, I would be able to make an informed decision about how to structure my class schedule (you know, heavy workload classes with light workload classes and such). When I started classes at AIPO, I was given a little printout that had the classes listed and broken down into the quarters. I do not know if this is patterned after some “ideal” student schedule or path to graduation but I have been handed my class schedules to me right off of this list, in the exact order. I have been given a choice to opt out of this prescribed schedule but I don’t have any of the insider information necessary to know which classes work better with each other.
Well, I have decided to share some of my experiences with other students through this blog. Future posts will speak about some of my experiences in each class and discuss my opinion of the class structure and workload. I will try to refrain from making any comments directed at the instructors, as I do not feel like being sued for libel, this also means that I will not be praising any particular instructors. In any case, you may generally find this information helpful in deciding how you should structure your workload at AIPO.
** Just a little information about me that might help you decide about my opinions of each class. I am a workaholic. I have a 4.0 GPA and have been on the Presidents List every quarter except one (I slipped down to the Dean’s list because I got an A- in one class) since I started at AIPO. I have a huge work ethic and am dedicated to my schoolwork. If I say a class is average, some people may find it difficult. If I find a class difficult, it is not because I am a slacker, there are some classes where the attrition rate is roughly 50% and I feel lucky to have maintained an A in these classes.
Jim
What I have planned for future posts. . .
I have been told that I am not blogging enough. What, one post to announce my blog is not enough for this year? OK, I guess I am not blogging enough. Part of my problem is my schedule for classes is such that I am constantly reading and writing. OK, that sounds like blogging right? Well, I have been thinking about where I want to go with this blog and I have a couple of directions that seem to occupy my brain the most so I will just kind of go with those. I am working on a post that contains a little advice about the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (Online) and should be done shortly. Stay tuned.
Hello world! (hey I know it is cliche but it is appropriate)
Well, this is my first foray into blogdom. I am not sure where this is headed but I can tell you where I am coming from. I am soon to be 40 years old and have been “playing” with computers since 1986. I am married to a wonderful woman, Mary Ellen, and have one six year old son, Jake. We live in Moscow, Idaho and I attend the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (Online), majoring in Interactive Media Design.
I don’t intend for this to be an “rant” site but they may slip out occasionally. I am not particularly politically inclined so you will not find a whole lot of that here. I am passionate about my education and my family so you will probably find a lot of that here. I will most likely be passing on my experiences with Online Education in general and the Art Institute Online specifically. Stick around and and bear with me as I learn about blogging, something good will come of this, I am sure.
Jim