One day I plan on entering the University of Washington. One day shortly thereafter I plan on applying to the iSchool. Shortly thereafter I expect to choose classes, schedule classes, and initialize my entrance into an educational experience that should prepare me for professional-level IA. More importantly I expect it to revolutionize the way I think about information, and/or have some of my existing notions confirmed, and have some others totally obliterated. I honestly expect that the ones that will be obliterated will coincide as the ideas I’m most fond of, are the most forward looking and philosophical, and appear in my papers; papers I expected to be burned in the hands of a professorial mob as they chase their idiot man-child frankenstein’s monster down the street for the kind of intellectual heresy that made Derrida so Derrided.
Alas I suspect that I can buy myself some time by learning NOW instead of later. By marching steadily up that sisyphean learning curve towards a state of blissful ignorance similar to Socrate’s when he said that bit about ‘knowing nothing’. To do that I’m going to dig up the texts that are part of the program. From working at a college I’ve learned that Prof’s are pretty fond of posting this kind of administrative material on the web for their students. Saves time, saves paper, saves 30 emails. So I suspect that I can get to a list of profs for required courses, find their web page, snatch up the corresponding syllabi and start trying to learn what the other kids are learning now.
“How dare you, attempt to usurp the time honored tradition of collegiate….,” you may say. To which I dismissively reply, “ah hush; information is free–or it should be. And don’t gimme that crap about “you can’t learn outside of a classroom,” or “don’t degrade the classroom, by stealing from it.” *Ears plugged*-lalalalala. Ok, yes, of course. You can take your desperate intellectual property-mindedness and shut up. You can hear my thoughts on that later. Maybe.
Anyway, so I’m going to use comments to add to my list of profs, pages, syllabi, and texts. Then I’m going to add those to my half.com wishlist, so you can buy it for me 
here we go:
For right now I’m just going to list URL’s for course websites. But I’m collecting all the reading I can. Note that these course listings are the result of searching the UW site and trying to pick the site with a. the most relevance as judged by the title, the link text, the descriptive text, and information about the quarter the info is for. I am trying to find information closest to Spring 2005, but not all courses appear to be available so I’m choosing the most recent.
Info 100: http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse100/CurrentQtr/index100.html
CSE 142: http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse142/
CSE 143: http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse143/
STAT 311: http://www.stat.washington.edu/murua/stat311/
– not finished –