Today marked the last class for this term, and the last class for one the stupidest courses I’ve ever taken (my Philosophical and Ethical Issues in Mass Media being a close second). That’s saying a lot considering it was the course I was most looking forward to last Summer. The course was called Machine Mediate Human Communication. Sounds super cool, eh? The course description read that we would do a Flash project, a DVD project and a website. I was so excited to learn how to do these things, I thought I’d leave the course with a portfolio to show in future job interviews. That’s not how things turned out though.
I left the first class totally confused about the direction of the class, and what skills we would need in it. I asked the professor at the end of class if I needed any skills to take this class. He promised me that he would teach us everything we needed to know. He would do lessons on all the various programs.
Flash forward to today, I am still waiting for one of those lessons. What programs did he teach us? None...Yes, honestly, none. Not even one.
Instead of learning Flash, Website design, and DVD design, we had one major project (which we still don’t know how much is worth. From my calculations, it’s worth 80% of our final mark). My group chose to do a DVD. The Prof. promised us that we could do it on “anything you want, we will show you everything you need to make it.” Okay! Ya right. We soon realised that we were on our own.
Thankfully I had an amazing group, and one member Patrycja, has a smart and helpful husband. You can see us making our DVD here. Other than working on the project, there were literally no classes. We would go, Durlak (the prof) would show up at least 30 minutes late, and then we would sit around trying to figure out what we were there for. I literally lost my cool on a few occasions and told them that their “idea generating games” like “try on different coloured hats” was a stupid waste of time.
Today I was all excited because we would be able to write the course evaluations, and I could vent. But, low and behold.....no one came to give them. There was no course evaluations! I guess it just goes along with everything else in this course though.
=P
