I never thought I’d use my voca­tional train­ing Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy cre­den­tials to any great effect, but have dis­cov­ered oth­er­wise in my first sub­ject this semes­ter (Com­put­ers in Edu­ca­tion, part of EDUF1019). I [will, on sub­mis­sion of a bun­dle of pho­to­copied joy (also known as cer­tifi­cate doc­u­men­ta­tion) sit­ting next to me] be exempt from atten­dance for the rest of semes­ter until the open-book exam in week eleven. Spectacular.

I don’t par­tic­u­larly believe Cer­tifi­cate III train­ing in Net­work Admin­is­tra­tion is par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to Clar­is­works, but no mat­ter! The ram­i­fi­ca­tions of this one HSC sub­ject (and very very lit­tle asso­ci­ated effort/work!) are astounding!

Despite all this, some inter­est­ing stuff about education-research-specific data­bases, etcetera, so I might go along next week any­way as the lec­turer (facil­i­ta­tor? It’s not a lec­ture nor par­tic­u­larly a tuto­r­ial, so I’m uncer­tain!) says it’ll be a bit more of the same stuff… after week 2 it’s meant to get into mun­dan­ity (impor­tant mun­dan­ity, I’m sure, but not par­tic­u­larly stim­u­lat­ing if you don’t have to!)

Maybe IT and education/arts aren’t as dichoto­mous as once thought… hmm. Along that line of thought, looks like Edu­ca­tion get all the cool toys! I walked down­stairs to level 2 on my way to the Com­put­ers in Edu­ca­tion thing and there were two guys set­ting up a room with a Pana­sonic MX-70, heaps of LCD pre­view mon­i­tors, video dis­tri­b­u­tion amps, audio gear (includ­ing valve pre-amps and other such nice thin­gies), and var­i­ous other won­der­ful geeky things. It’s a pretty strange rig for an edit­ing suite, but an even stranger secu­rity mon­i­tor­ing setup (like, unbe­liev­ably waste­ful if that’s what it’s all for!)… but any­way, I’m hop­ing to fig­ure out what on earth it’s for then spend lots of time in there by what­ever means pos­si­ble! Muwahahahaha.

In other uni-related news, I changed my timetable for this semes­ter around a bit so that I don’t have an Eng­lish sem­i­nar end­ing at 7pm and can get to The Night Train (and our Wednes­day night bible study once that kicks off again in the sec­ond half of the semes­ter) with­out speeding/taxis/killing small children/missing sem­i­nars. Which is always a good thing!

Tags: lecturer, Network Administration, Panasonic, vocational training Information Technology