Mother of All Posts

I am way behind on blogging, so I’ll use the time to catch up.

Allan Chochinov on how to teach design students:

Talk to undergrads like they’re grads; talk to grads like they’re undergrads.
This is the best trick I’ve learned in 11 years of teaching. Undergraduates have youth, fearlessness, and great tolerance for being pushed around. What they don’t have is people talking to them like they matter. They are used to being talked to like children by people of authority (high school didn’t help), and will be stunned when you address them like real designers who have ideas of worth.

Graduate students have wisdom, life experience, and a desire to actually be in school. But graduate students also are old enough to know that ideas have consequences, and as a result they run, basically, on fear. They have refrains like “I didn’t think that idea would be any good, so I didn’t mock it up,” or “I wasn’t sure what to build, so I read these books.”

Treat the undergrads like they’re grown-ups (which they are); show them crazy respect, and ask their opinions all the time. Tell your graduate students to stop talking and start building; tell them not to come to class next week if they don’t bring in 12 sketches. And then thank your lucky stars when they arrive with 3.

Dave Kender on safe storage of videotapes.

What programming language to learn? Deborah Rothberg recommends some (php and C#). Joel Spolsky recommends Php and Java without expressing a firm preference:

How do you decide between C#, Java, PHP, and Python? The only real difference is which one you know better. If you have a serious Java guru on your team who has build several large systems successfully with Java, you’re going to be a hell of a lot more successful with Java than with C#, not because Java is a better language (it’s not, but the differences are too minor to matter) but because he knows it better. Etc.

Reuven Lerner basically agrees, but says Ruby shouldn’t be dismissed so easily.

Structured blogging which is basically blogging + content types (using microformats). Good idea (and yes, obvious!)