School days, school days...

Well, OK, school evenings. And what do you call online-at-any-time classes? Classes began last Thursday (the 18th) at the community college, and with my one on-campus course meeting Thursday evenings, that means I have now attended two sessions. The course is called Introduction to Telecommunications in the catalog, but the instructor says that's wrong because the course has been totally restructured. The course info sheet says that it is two parts of a "three-course series" called CIW Foundations (it's supposed to prepare you to take the CIW certification exams), part 1 being Internet Business Foundations and part 2 being Network Technology Foundations. Interestingly enough (OK, it's actually fairly uninteresting, but bear with me), those titles also happen to be the exact titles of the textbooks.

Although ostensibly running from 6:30 to 10:00 pm, the first class lasted only an hour (with the instructor basically reading the course information sheet to us), and last night's was just a bit over two hours. Thank God. Our assignment had been to read the first chapter in the book, which I dutifully did; mind-numbingly boring, it damned near put me to sleep when I read it, and it didn't get any better when Mr. Instructor went over it in class. I can't quite imagine how one could spend three and a half hours on this material. According to the book, by the end of lesson 1 I should be able to:

• Define IT job roles. (Broken down into such job titles as web designer, web application developer, web architect, web site analyst, web site manager, and more. Of course, at most companies one person probably wears half or more of these hats.)
  
• Define networks.
• Define the Internet. (This is important. The book devotes almost a whole page to "How the Internet works.")
  
• Identify Internet connection methods. (Yep, according to my field guide, that there's a cat 5 cable...)
  
• Define Internet protocols.
• Define the Domain Name System.

Just listing these almost puts me to sleep. This boils down largely to a ton of acronyms. I think Mr. Instructor really gets a kick out of reeling off the words that each acronym stands for, and somehow I expect that the quiz he promised us next week is going to lean heavily on said acronyms. Personally, I feel that it's fairly irrelevant exactly what ISDN or WAN or TCP/IP or ICANN stands for; what's important is knowing whether, for example, ISDN is a network, a connection method, or a protocol, and what its distinguishing characteristics are. I'll be damned if I'm going to waste my time memorizing acronyms for the sake of memorizing acronyms. But that's just me.

I can hardly wait till we get to try some of the "lab" exercises. Why, in lesson 1 alone, you get to insert an image in a web page, "conduct a basic web site analysis" (translation: look at a spreadsheet of statistics from a fictional website, note the large number of 404 page not found errors, and deduce that someone needs to fix some links), and connect to servers and web pages using domain names, IP addresses, and the ftp protocol. What fun! Did I mention that I was a webmaster for almost four years?

Stay tuned for lesson 2: it's an in-depth look at... web browsing! Gads, I wish there was a challenge test for this class.