Australian & New Zealand game education

The only reason I will raise something is if given a good reason to. I'd actually much rather not. I have much better things to do with my time.

I would have said a lot less here if other AIE grads hadn't asked me. I gave an honest answer. Sorry.

But my point has been made and if you would like we can delete the posts here because this is a sticky thread. I would appreciate it if the comment about NSW TAFE teachers be deleted as well, as no evidence has been provided.

No I think they should stay Lorien. It's good to have yet another point of reference that you can point people to, to show people how bitter you are re the AIE. It's funny that you continually say how bad the AIE is, yet by your own admission the games course at the University you work at has not had 1 graduate yet, and the AIE is continually winning awards, or is rated very highly by the vocational training industry.

I fail to see what this has to do with you Dan Giddings. You don't have anything to do with the AIE anymore as you said... I have no problem with it staying. I have no problem with it being deleted either. No lies here.

Grover has understood me best, he called me "concerened" recently, and said he'd never call me paranoid.

Actually, as I said, I give guest lectures if they request them. I'm more than happy to help them out, as they helped myself and many other people get into the industry.

"University you work at has not had 1 graduate yet" is not true I'm afraid Dan. The specialist degree hasn't. There have been quite a few "majoring in games tech" honours graduates.

I'm curious about how those awards are entered and who decides the winners, but it's off topic in this thread.

edit:

It's university I study and work at btw- my position atm is an honour and my other job title is "associate lecturer" still.

While you are feeling the need to boast about awards latrobe comp-sci has been rated in the top 10 in the world twice in recent years by the Journal of Systems and Software.

quote:I'm curious about how those awards are entered and who decides the winners, but it's off topic in this thread.
Not that getting off topic has ever stopped you before [;)].....however I feel it's extremely relevant since we are discussing how good certain educational institutions are. Since you asked, last year AIE Canberra won the ACT Small Training Organisation of the Year for the second time. This is run by the ACT Department of Education and Training and is a lot of work just to enter. I know because I helped write the submission and presented to the panel. You can find out more about the ACT Training Excellence Awards here ~ [url]http://www.decs.act.gov.au/publicat/2005Awards/2005AwardWinners.htm[/url]

Winners in each state qualify to enter the Australian Training Awards which are run by the Federal Department of Education, Science and Training. New submission, another inspector and presentation. You can find out more about the Australian Training Awards here ~[url]http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/training_skills/policy_issues_reviews/ke…]

We were made finalists which means that we were in the top three! Check it out here ~ [url]http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/training_skills/policy_issues_reviews/ke…]

That was last year. Prior to that we have won more awards ~ yet another link ~ [url]http://www.aie.act.edu.au/about/awards.php[/url]

quote:my point has been made and if you would like we can delete the posts here because this is a sticky thread

I appreciate that you are sharing your experiences to help potential students better evaluate their options. However your experiences now happened four years ago. Your comments do not represent what the AIE does now and you have acknowledged that.

Obviously I would prefer that there were no negative comments about AIE anywhere but that is not realistic. It's up to you if you delete your comments even though I feel that they are misleading since they do imply the things you refer to are current issues when they are not.

At the end of the day, the whole point of having a forum in Sumea on games education is for people to post their comments and opinions. Those who are interested can read them and form their own opinion.

Actually Neil I'm mostly very good at staying on topic. I think it's best we disagree on that. We have different ideas about what "on topic" is.

Universities work very differently than training institutions for those who don't know. Unis get rated by peer-reviewed published research output. The work of staff, postgraduate and honours students.

To give people some idea of the difference here is the description of the Journal of Systems and Software http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jss

quote:
The Journal of Systems and Software publishes papers covering all aspects of programming methodology, software engineering and related hardware/software systems issues. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, software systems, prototyping issues, high-level specification techniques, procedural and functional programming techniques, data-flow concepts, multiprocessing, real-time, distributed, concurrent, and telecommunications systems, software metrics, reliability models for software, performance issues, and management concerns. The journal publishes research papers, state-of-the-art surveys, and reports of practical experience. All articles should consider the practical application of the ideas advanced through case studies, experiments, or systematic comparisons with other approaches already in practice. Occasionally, special issues are devoted to topics of particular interest; proposals for such issues are invited.

Peer-reviewed means everything gets reviewed by experts in the field. If it's crap it just gets rejected out of hand, otherwise it gets commented on, sent back to the author, revised, resubmitted, etc.

My point is to show that unis in general have rather different goals to training organisations. If you look through some of the links Neil provided you will see exactly what I mean.

I've heard QANTM have Sony Foundation scholarships now, which would make it three institutions afaik (AIE, La Trobe and QANTM).

edit:

The AGDC thing is still fairly current imho. How would you react if La Trobe owned and ran a similar thing, and we let our own students in for free while making it more expensive for everyone else's students? I doubt you would be at all happy- particularly if you were an unhappy La Trobe graduate [;)]

I for one am glad the AGDC won't be an issue anymore because it doesn't exist anymore.

I'm at a bit of a loss about how to change this without making the replies not make any sense... I'm fine with this whole flurry of posts vanishing (moderators) and I'm fine with them staying too.

Just a note, moderation is pretty much here to cull spam and make everything more accessible. Apart from that obvious task, there's a fairly clear unspoken code of conduct which dictates it's not here to censor, or scrub squeeky clean. I'm saying this in general, not just for this thread -- If you have something you believe worthwhile to say, say it. If you say it, live with it. People shouldn't need others to clean up a mess for them, but are expected to be mature enough not to make (or incite) one in the first place if they can't deal with it later.

No problem there, I have no problems with my posts here. There are good reasons for each of them, and saying I don't mind them being deleted (or deleting them myself) is being kind taking into account that this thread is sticky.

Not sure if you mean me inciting JI, my perspective is the inciting was a post of a rumour from the AGDC concerning NSW TAFE teachers (I've studied at Hornsby TAFE myself btw).

Something which doesn't seem to be generally understood is that unis are not really in competition with training institutions. It would be like apples being in competition with oranges I think.

Neil is also the guy who publicly thanked me for going above and beyond the call of duty on the AIE's website a few years ago.

quote:Originally posted by the_geeves
A little bird was telling me about these NSW tafe teachers at AGDC that hadn't taught C++ before and had to learn Maya in 3 months before the course started........very impressive.

I'm currently in this course and this isn?t true. The C++ teacher has been programming for a long time, and the graphics teacher knows his stuff very well.