First Class Report

Yesterday saw the first meeting of the Capstone and the Adobe Illustrator® classes I’m teaching this semester. This morning was the first meeting of Typography & Layout. I really like the small class sizes. It gives me a better opportunity to interact with the students than I would find with a larger class size.

Along with the usual first-day review of the course syllabus and class policies, we were able to get into the “meat” of the subject. The Typography & Layout students were hit with a heavy dose of the history of graphic design, while the Illustrator® students got an idea of the visual possibilities of vector graphics and a rudimentary introduction to the toolbox. The Illustrator® class was also introduced to the concept of learner-directed classes. This approach encourages each student to learn at their own pace. This is particularly important in technology classes, where everyone connects with the software at different level, and pulling a class along at the same pace is pretty much impossible. After graduation my students will have to constantly learn new software as professional practitioners. Having the students “learn to learn” prepares them for this challenge much better than spoon-feeding them technology instruction. The class seemed to understand the value of the learner-directed approach. I’m looking forward to a very productive semester.

I’ve got my office stuff unpacked, and I’m starting to put things away. I taught myself the phone system today. Actually, a tutorial I found on a website for an Oklahoma school district taught me the phone system. The internet can be a very handy thing.

Tomorrow I plan to venture on a brave new path: I’m going to have lunch in the campus cafeteria. When I was an undergrad, the acronym for our food-service provider was interpreted by the students to mean, “Soviet Attempt to Gag America”. I’m hoping the the Colorado Mountain College dining hall doesn’t evoke a similar sentiment. This upcoming culinary experience will likely be the subject of my next post.