more alternative lives
Speaking of alternative lives, I went to a class today that reminded me of a former life. I'm auditing this Mobile Interaction class in the Computer Science department (I forget sometimes that not everyone knows what CS stands for). From the course description:
"This course will address social science research on mobility, novel input and display techniques, multimodal interaction, location and context computing, infrastructural support, and mobile-appropriate techniques for user observation and experimentation."I think it has a lot of potential. And the reading was good, even though sometimes I feel like everything HCI-related (HCI = Human Computer Interaction) I've already read before, even if it wasn't quite the same article. The point of this post, though, is that I WAS SO UTTERLY BORED. SO BORED. The professor and TA are off at CHI, we had a guest guy, and he talked APIs and SDKs and other TLAs that I still know, but have left behind. And I think I was his touch point on the audience, because whenever I started to drift off and at least entertain myself with my rich inner life, he would mention something about losing us, and I would feel guilty, and attempt to look like I was paying attention. Until I completely gave up and started playing solitaire on my iPod.
And then we had a discussion about the reading, where one guy talked about how he'd never text messaged before, and didn't really believe in it. Meanwhile I'd text messaged the guy sitting next to me during the boring lecture about how bored I was. And then another "discussion leader" for the class asked us if we agreed with the reading, while stating that he totally didn't. Um, how is that leading a discussion?
The point here, being that I COULD HAVE BEEN ONE OF THEM. I have a CS degree, I like HCI, I can throw around TLAs like they're going out of style. And at one point I would have tried to be interested in that talk. God, I'm so glad I'm not there anymore.
Maybe I'm thinking about my own alternative lives because of Designing the Future, a class I'm actually taking. We watched Blade Runner and the Fifth Element in class the first day, and then this week we're reading science fiction. I mean, how could I not take this class? I'll admit it, I love science fiction. I hang out in the science fiction section of the bookstore enough that I've been hit on four times in there. I know better, but I can't help myself. I hope it's good. Right now it's 3-5 people, depending on how you count auditors, plus four members of the teaching staff. That's the kind of student to faculty ratio I like to see.
