WELL, it was the first proper week back at uni. It’s been… educational. I finished work on the Sunday afternoon and headed straight back up to the flat. I had my first class at noon on Monday. It was the module, Digital Platforms.
I wasn’t sure. I had no idea what it was about and the module guide was vague.
We all wandered into the classroom. It was packed. There was a good number of people I had never seen before. Perhaps other courses were involved in this module as well.
The lecturer didn’t waste any time. He jumped straight into it.
That was round about the time all the colour drained from my face.
Basically, it is about making websites, encoding and understanding HTML, CSS (which I’m pretty sure are an electro band) and other kinds of technological hoo-haa.
Oh dear.
I am absolutely awful with technology, despite an enthusiasm for gadgets. Last year, we had Broadcast Journalism which was basically all technology and this year we have Digital Platforms which will be all technology. Sad times.
The lecturer went on to explain that we would have create a website and it would consist of five pages of whatever we wanted. For example, a girl in last year’s class devoted her website to the history of denim, which I thought was quite cool, and one guy last year did his on Egyptology.
I liked the idea of being able to choose the content – that could be really fun. But it would be getting to that point that I would find nigh impossible.
I realised that I was just sitting scrolling up and down my facebook page when the tech guy came in to sort us all (me and two others who can’t work anything with wires) out.
However, if we want to have our own website domain, it will cost. Yeah, because I have the money to pay for that… I’m a student. I have NO money.
So, coming away from that class full of worry and lamenting my lack of knowledge in matters technological, I made my way to my next class. Creative writing. I had a little more hope for this class.
I was pretty good at literary journalism. It won’t be that different. It is. But in a good way though.
We had to continue writing from a passage that our lecturer read out. It was about an old woman and we were to make something up about her character in a paragraph. I made her kind and basically your stereotypical old woman, but my friend seemed to like her character with a little more edge and made the fictional 70 year-old a drug addict…
Well I’m not saying it isn’t creative…
Lisa-Nicole Mitchell is a third-year BA in Journalism student at Edinburgh Napier University.
