This was fun. Really. And it wasn’t expected to be like this. The course was called “smart graphics” and I liked it. And one reason was the teacher…

Mister Professor Doctor rerum naturalium R. C. – cool dude btw. – and his motto: /“no stress”/! Long before the first meeting I knew just the little summary of the course description – shortly it’s about how graphics could make your life easier and how to connect graphics with human environments. Sounds a little bit like knowledge which I hoped I could find in the /Motion Graphics Interfaces/ course.

Really this sounds like a topic for comp science people, eh? Believe me, it is. The course had weekly lectures, two longer presentations (nearly 4 hours each) at some weekends, several multiple choice tests and two bigger submission tasks and finally a half hour of an oral exam.

The topics ranged from ARP-Spoofing to ZAP-Tests and everything with practical exercises. Attack vectors, sniffing, firewalls, ransomware, a very good mixture and deep insight into security. A smaller second part dealt with things like (the german) IT baseline protection, ISO 27000 and information security management systems. In fact, this course had a very (very, very) high information density rate and it wasn’t as easy as I tought it would be. Things like OWASPs ZAP, encryption and authentication methods was part of my daily work in the last years – no problem. But as it came to the hardware related stuff it became hard for me as well. Strange network masks – not mine. Binary calculations – not mine. Had a huge amount to learn.

Really! But I don’t know how and I don’t know in which relation I know things teached here. Media Didactics or didactics in general. Maybe I had some basic knowledge earned in a project or in my diploma thesis days.

Usually I don’t like to work on topics that are so far from my interests. I’m not a teacher, I’m happy when I can fix or create things or solve riddles for myself without bothering others. When I was younger I preferred taking extra hours at night (in the dark… alone!). This course meant team work, with team results and with a team! And I remembered the topic as a little bit dry and boring. At least it was just one multiple choice test and two written concepts to finish this. And writing concepts is something I had done often in past.

At the university I’m currently in a course called “Design of Motion Graphic Interfaces” and one assignment is to create a video clip consisting of four parts matching the following requirements:

• the 1st part should introduce me
• the other parts should be related to given chapters from Hararis “Homo Deus”
• you’ll have to use given techniques (like greenscreening, shape-transforming, alpha-masks,…)
• try to avoid cliparts and copyrighted content
• and intermediate sequences should glue everything together

I have to say that this isn’t my personal favorite work to do and I had to start from scratch. I’ve never worked with a tool like Adobe After Effect before (I didn’t like Macromedias Director at a similar course 20 years ago) and there wasn’t even a small introduction into the software – only the statement that the students should take an online course for beginners, Hararis book, the requirements and weekly meetings on “How it’s going”. Funny that we talked in another course (media didactics) about target groups and forms of learning I thought. The basic knowledge of the course members ranged from “bloody noob” to semi professional. I think that comparing the results at the end isn’t that easy. Maybe working in a group would have been more appropriate here.

First round:

• motion graphics @ BHT
• smart graphics @ THB
• security techniques in communication networks @ THL
• media didactics @ BHT

Don’t know if midlife-crisis hits me hard yet – or something else – but now I’m officially a student again. It’s (nearly) the same course of studies as twenty years ago and if I read the module handbook I find a lot of similarities. But as I said – 20 yrs – a lot of time, a lot of changes and I’m really a little bit afraid of the things to come.