Re: UKNM: Fresh Horses

[chris]

At 12:47 16/12/99 -0000, you wrote:

 >Any opinions of colleges and/or courses of significant worth?

 >

 >Who is turning out the best crop and why?


I've *some* previous experience in this area. ;)


Designers - most of the good colleges are churning out web-savvy students

whether they encourage it or not.  The visionaries seem to be at the RCA,

and Middlesex's courses produce a good crop.


Coders - CS departments have major trouble hanging on to students who are

good at coding for internet applications - UCL's CS department has produced

some existing stars (step forward Stefan Magdalinksi) and continues to be

one of the best departments in the UK for research.  It has excellent

industry links to people like Stephen Emmott and the NCR Knowledgelab.


Editors/Journalists/managers - Falmouth College of Arts in Cornwall runs a

journalism course that is heavily biased towards on-line Journalism - one

of their students won the Guardian Student Web Site category of the

Guardian Student Media Awards this year.  I'm biased because I helped set

up the course.  UCL also has the Xerox-sponsored MA in Electronic

Communication & Publishing.  Again, I'm biased because I set up this

course.  The new course-leader has changed it quite a lot so I'm not sure

precisely what the course covers now, but we tried to cram in everything we

could in the first year, from basic HTML and javascript to the cultural

impact of the web and future systems.  I still believe the best

editors/project managers are people from non-CS disiplines who bring

prespective from another discipline to the web. The MA I ran at UCL was

intended to bridge the skills gap between completing an arts/humanities BA

and entering the industry.


Of course, the best way for everyone on this list to ensure that the

calibre of students meets their skills gaps is to talk to the courses and

give free lectures.  Last feb I took 10 people to Falmouth for a week of

industry lectures, and I still lecture occasionally for free at UCL and do

external examining for the Oxford Brookes MA in Multimedia.  It helps the

courses develop as they get a clearer picture of how the industry is

developing, and you get (sometimes) to pick of the cream of the students

before everyone else!


chris.


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