I drove out to Hsuan Chuang University last night to teach but unfortunately took a wrong turn and got lost. I did manage to get to the class just in time only to realize that I forgot my dvi-vga adaptor. Lovely start.

Some things I learned from the experience:

• No one has heard of Flickr or Myspace. Some people know about Gmail
• The students are fiercely loyal to local Taiwan web sites (both applications and communities) regardless of how inferior they are to other sites in their language produced elsewhere
• This class speaks far more English than the last. Cool
• I said that technology is an enabler. They say that to be modern we must let technology lead. The sense I get is that they don't really get the idea of balancing customer and business needs. They don't really think about humanizing technology and building things that allow people to do things, with technology allowing that to happen. Pick a platform first then make people use it instead of find out what people need and pick a platform to make it happen.
• Each year the students seem more "free" - lots of chit chat and far less discipline - almost like a Canadian classroom which is too bad
• I dislike podiums and lecturing. My idea of class as a conversation bombed - "lets make it like the web - you have the material already - lets start with with an idea and see where it goes" - I'm naive - structure is still king
• Everyone loves stories and loves to laugh

Overall an interesting evening if not rather distracting. The doors to the classroom were open - to the left of me were beautiful ladies line dancing to music, to the right was an old black dog constantly licking his genitals. I bet no one else can claim to those kind of distraction when teaching.

Categorized: Design

Tagged: 2, User Experience