Cyan_Ide

To be fair to you, you live in Madison, which is pretty much an entity unto itself when compared to the rest of the state.

And man does it dominate the search results. I had to physically click IN Urbana to double check. Bastards!!

Yes, yes I see that now.....when I did the search, the university downtown came up as the "University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign" so now I am thoroughly confused. Labeling mistake??

No no, you misunderstand. I haven't been here in awhile. That information is old....very old. I live 12 blocks north of the *Chicago* River, on Dearborn, near Division. I assume you are from the uni of Chicago just south of Union Station....just west of the river, no?

So, uhh, Wes, we should meet up sometime. I live about a dozen blocks north of the river, in the Gold Coast....

The thing you have to remember with many technologically-based degrees is that they often are hard-pressed to keep up with the industry in terms of software and methodologies. With places like Adobe pumping out new Suites every year and a half, and new technologies becoming popular by the year, it's hard for the school to keep up. With any of these sorts of degrees, the onus often falls upon the student to make up the ground that the programs have weaknesses in through industry research. That has been my experience with multimedia degrees in general. You will live and die by the work that you produce. The degree serves as a piece that shows that you have the dedication to slog through four years of college classes to earn a bachelor's in your field, not necessarily that you are an expert in your field. You determine that by your actions. Choosing the type of school that you attend is an immensely personal process that requires you to recognize the type of environment that best fits your educational growth. I have my opinions on particular schools, certainly, but where I see a degree mill, a person who attended the school saw an excellent experience with what they thought were good professors, which is why it is hard to say that you or anyone else should go to DigiPen or FullSail instead of a traditional uni. I don't know if this is what skews the facts or not, but it seems like they are arguing that traditional uni makes you more well-rounded as opposed to a specialist, that you could program anything as opposed to just video games, so of course that would seem better because people are getting jobs out of industry as well as in it, so job placement seems greater. Maybe I'm wrong on their meaning, but this is how I interpreted the article. I think it's just a matter of knowing your own mind. Some people prefer application, while some people like the academic atmosphere of traditional uni because it prepares them to absorb the information they need. I think it's a bit of a flawed article in that it seems to assume that everyone's mind and learning mechanisms work in the same way. As with many of these types of degrees, you get out of them the amount of work and dedication that you put into them. A person determined to be in the industry will do well to do all they can to know all they can, and take full advantage of resources available, regardless of the institution that they are attending.

No kidding. Good on them. Their high bar work was simply electrifying.

If you're talking about yourself we'll need to see some print work in your portfolio since all of yours appear to be screen. ...Is there a well-traced Vector EPS of it somewhere...? I sure hope somebody has one, even if it's not distributed.

Try telling that to an installation artist. Audience interaction is the name of the game for many of them.

If being 'for-profit' is a disqualification from being art, then our art galleries, art history books, and music libraries would be empty. Be careful when attempting to condemn the whole of commercial art for doing it for the money. How on earth do people believe artists are able to not starve to death with this sort of thinking?

I disagree. Jill’s statement came off very hostile to me. It sounded a lot like censure to me. A ban is merely the final form of censorship. Maybe you want to take it out of this thread which is utilized for support of OCR OurStage? Fine, but don't outright end it. Listen, I see both sides of the issues. PhiJayy is pointing out the [blatantly obvious] flaws in the system, and honestly, the nepotism is pretty thinly veiled, and even encouraged by the site proper, it appears. But you guys are leveraging the power of a community to which you have dedicated many hours to, which is also understandable. After all why not use it to gain more community exposure? The only difference is that PhiJayy is a bit more idealist, and pointing out the fallacies of the broken system. You guys are utilizing the Machine to its fullest potential in order to beat it. Not your fault the system is broken, you’re just working in it, which is why I can’t definitively agree with PhiJayy or disagree with you. I can’t say which one is right, but obviously it has spawned a discussion that has involved more than just PhiJayy, including McVaffe and Dhsu, so obviously it *is* a topic that merits further discussion. That said, comments like ‘there’s no need for drama’ and ‘you’ve made your point’ are clear-cut attempts [to me, at least] to nip any dissent at the bud. If you disagree, do so, but don’t go about it by shutting PhiJayy up.

Yeah, 'moving out' did more damage than the custom maps in my not joining.

I see that Fusion hasn't yet lost his delusions of grandeur.

Does bring one back, doesn't it?

Alright. I'm not quite sure what you want to know, but you said talk about media and technology classes. I recently graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in Multimedia Design. As I do graphic design and non-Flash based web design, that is the programming and work that I will be touching on. I've had a lot of good experiences, and quite a bit of bad, so here we go. First thing first, students NEED to have the WYSIWYG web editing stuff NOT TAUGHT to them. Too many students are coming out of schools not knowing the first thing about CSS and (X)HTML and getting jobs laying down web pages. Why? Because in school, they were taught that Dreamweaver can do it all for them. But what Dreamweaver does is convolute code and create messy structure. Case in point, in my educational experience, for the first two years of school, I thought CSS was the name of the little toolbox that let you edit styles in Dreamweaver, not a separate markup structure (it's not technically a language) in its own right. I completely learned CSS and XHTML on my own. Classes only helped insomuch as they provided an arena in which I was able to practice my learning. Second, this is from a designer perspective, there must be a basic understanding of both sides of the coin in order to do either of them. Now, if a programmer can't design to save his life, that's fine. That is what a designer is there for. But experience in working in web design has shown that one cannot create a *good* functioning site without a knowledge of how the design translates to code. This is a fundamental flaw in the graphic designers that make PSD files and get them sliced somewhere else. As much as CSS designers don't like to admit it, there are just some things design-wise that are either far too obtuse, or out of reach, given current technology. Conversely, the guy who does the PHP has to have a basic understanding of how the design creates a user experience and how the user works his or her way through the interface in order to create an application which best suits the need. One major criticism I've had for our program is that we need professors that can do the stuff that they are teaching. Quite often, I've either had a professor who knows, say, Flash, and thus teaches a blanket interactive class but knows nothing about static web. When that has happened, the onus basically falls on Lynda.com to teach us what we needed to know about web programming. I don't know about anyone else, but if a tutorial isn't engaging nearly to the minute, or is working toward some huge greater goal that I am directly applying, I don't want to watch it. And I most certainly do not have a short attention span. Web design is not a culmination of one's knowledge of Dreamweaver, but an understanding of user interaction, graphical layout, and clean markup which leads to faster rendering and better indexing by search engines. Lastly, and I saved this for last because it is something I feel strongly about, there absolutely needs to be a disruption of the myopia that afflicts many multimedia courses. Whether this is a weakness in the academic systems or the instructors, I cannot say, but I would say that all of the work we were taught in class was outdated by at least a year. On top of that, no one has ever sent me to any sort of resource that would keep me informed of what is happening in the web world. I have found all of those resources in my free time. If I were to drop all of my plans and were given a master's degree right here and now and become a professor, I would constantly seek out what people in the field are doing RIGHT NOW and apply it. For example, perhaps a few week's introduction to Wordpress, or a project that centres on a workflow that involves integrating CMSes with design. I would encourage my students to visit CSS galleries as often as possible to see what other people in the field are doing. As workers in the fields of multimedia, it is our job to be at near the forefront of technology, thus I would also encourage them to learn in unconventional ways, through online communities, blogs, forums, etc. It is my opinion that the fellow students that I have watched succeed in school are the ones who in their spare time are participating in that which they are going to school for. The good animators have gigs of hard drive space and dvd seasons of their favourite cartoons. The good web designers are watching the galleries. The 3D folks are all on CGTalk and similar communities. With the advent of machine-made design, our field has become muddied with Photoshop pirates who think they can design because they have the software. With this immense oversaturation, we are having huge problems finding work unless one is at the pinnacle of the field. What this means for us as web people is that in order to succeed, we need to completely devote ourselves over to the craft. I was actually talking about this to a graphic design professor and some other students tonight. If you don't eat, sleep, and breathe design, you better start packing your bags because right now this is the completely WRONG field to enter unless you are totally on board with design, because it's a tough crowd. So those are my thoughts on the matter. I think in terms the workforce, there's far too much generalization going on in the seeking of employment, and not enough specialists. If you want my opinion on what should be done for your program, I would say seek out the applications of programming in relation to the various media fields, rather than just an introduction to the media itself which offers no actual gain other than an increasing sense of being in over one's head. But that's just my opinion.