Independent Study
Published by Jonathan September 12th, 2006 in Grad School, LSC895A number of years after failing miserably at being a Computer Science major, I am giving programming another go. I’ve been writing HTML/CSS for a few years now so I’m going to take the next step and learn PHP. Okay, so it’s basically a scripting language and not a big time, all-around language like Java or C++, but it will help me learn to do what I want - which is create dynamic web sites.
If you know me, you’ll be wondering how I found the time to do this with work and school and baby. Simple, it’s called Independent Study. Design a course that meets YOUR interests, get a faculty member to advise you and bingo! you’ve gotten around the lack of interesting classes being offered. Of course, Independent Study is not a simple thing or else everyone would be doing it. My objectives for the semester are quite ambitious but I am excited about them and I have a cool prof.
In a nutshell, what I’m going to try and accomplish:
- Learn PHP (and some MySQL and Apache)
- Review some lit about exploratory searching, faceted classifications, categorized overviews, etc.
- Implement a categorized overview to the search results of a website in PHP
- Conduct a pilot usability study on it
- Write about the study and submit the paper to JCDL!
Phew. I’m tired just thinking about how much work I have to do!
Technorati tags: graduate school, library science, PHP, exploratory searching
and how much time do you have to accomplish all of that??
Good luck to you!! (& yes it does sound interesting)