I still remember that in the lecture of
this week, one speaker a question: what things you consider as knowledge? That
is actually quite interesting and inspirational for us to know what kind of altitude
we should have towards learning.
In
our normal understandings, knowledge mostly means the skills especially
technical skills. For example, before we enter the university, all the information
we acquired in the class were thought as knowledge. As a result, the course
grade we got was treated as the standard to judge how rich your knowledge was.
But as we have learnt so many different kinds of things after we entered the
university, the scope of knowledge is no longer as narrow as we thought before.
Communication skills, self-study ability, project management skills and even
the principles in life are all the knowledge you cannot learn from lecture,
tutorial or workshop but they are proved to be quite essential. In this case,
knowledge is more about your understandings for several aspects of the world
other than the useless calculation skills or business cases you learn in the
textbooks in order to get higher grade or gain more money.
For the experience I gain so far from CS3216, I indeed have the feeling
that knowledge is not restricted to what we can learn from lectures, tutorial
sheets, online documentation content or experience shared by skillful seniors.
When I do front-end design, design for UI and UX is not the mechanized and tedious
coding work but really depends on your life experience, your arts connoisseurship
and even your personalities. Good arts connoisseurship results in harmonious UI
structuring splendid UI appearance and life experience and your personalities
decide whether you can provide the results that users really want under their
oral requirements for you. Steve Jobs said that when users propose the
requirements for the products, in most case they won’t correctly deliver their
desires and that is your responsibility to figure out what are hidden under the
surface. Therefore, this design for UX requires a lot on your comprehensive
abilities or in another word, knowledge. That’s why we can see that the persons
who design the most excellent front-end are not just experts in computer
technology but also out-standing in many areas which may seems not to be
relevant with design.
Live
and learn. That is not just a good learning attitude. Moreover, it tells us
that knowledge exist in almost everywhere in our lives. Living and learning
help us discover the knowledge hidden inside lives and that probably will be
more important and valuable than what we gain from standard textbooks and trainings.