Planning on learning something critical to my academic happiness...

[alexr_rwx]

One of these years -- one of these years, I'm probably going to learn that the whole social-sciences-y side of computer science is a lot more interesting in the abstract than in practice. In practice, classes like "HCI" or "Educational Technolgy" or even the cog-sci classes... just end up pissing me off.

It's not that it's "interdisciplinary" between AI and philosophy and psychology... it's that it's at the tipping point of interesting-ness between all of these and it ends up sounding like noise. To me, anyway.

Let's just go write some code or open up some brains or something.

Comments

learning smoothies!

[laurapatt.livejournal.com]

what's the big deal with interdisciplinary classes anyway? was there something fundamentally boring with pure disciplines and they had to be mixed with other pure-but-boring disciplines to hopefully come with a slightly tastier smoothy of a subject?
interestingly enough, while "educational technology" may be not so interesting, education classes by themselves are fairly interesting, pending a good teacher. one can only reasonably assume then that it's the technology that makes the class dull. Liberal Arts Win Again!

Re: learning smoothies!

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Most things are probably interesting, given a good teacher. Or at least that goes a long way!

Once, I had an upsetting HCI class, with our friend Sean schizobovine suffering alongside -- but it wasn't nearly so upsetting when a very good teacher (Mr. Dr. Jeff Pierce (http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/jspierce/)) talked about usability issues in our "using AIs to build programs your mom would use" class.

(also: and it might turn out that disciplines come out of interdisciplines...)