Hello!
I’m José Vega-Cebrián, also known as Sejo. I’m an ITP First Year student and I come from Mexico City. I am the director and co-founder of Escenaconsejo, performing arts and interactive digital media company. I have a degree in Electronics Engineering from the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México (I mention it because it’s the best private university in Mexico, and it’s interesting to be now in one of the best private universities in the US). I also started to study Choreography in the National School of Classical and Contemporary Dance, but I dropped out in order to formally start with my company. I’m very interested in the possible relationships between choreographic composition and computation.
During the last two and a half years I was a high school teacher in the International Baccalaureate department of the same school I went to, teaching the Computer Science course. I was also part of the Design, Art and Technology department. I really like to share what I know and I have experienced, not only in terms of information but also in terms of life attitudes (hard work, determination, curiosity, self-motivation…). As a student and as a teacher I had many conflicts with the education system, because I felt that it actually discouraged learning and/or the excitement that should/could come with it. I believe that we all can do something about it. I’m also interested in the possible relationships between this and my artistic practice.
I’m very excited to start this course with you all!
José (Sejo)
P.S. You can follow me on Twitter as @Sejo___________
Wow, you’ve really covered a lot of ground between your teaching, artistic practice, and company! How did you feel that the education system discouraged learning as a teacher?
Also, if you have not already you might want to have a chat with 2nd year Leon Eckert, he did a project Genetic Dance Algorithm (http://www.geneticdancealgorithm.com/) you’ll probably be interested in.
Thanks! It’s a very complex situation. On one hand there was the set of expectations of the role of a teacher in paternalistic terms: as a knowledge-giver, authority, responsible of the students academic performance… There’s also the notion of the school assignment being “fictitious” –only for homework purposes, despite its possibilities of going beyond that and directly into the “real world”. The need of covering an homogeneous (and static?) study plan regardless of the size and diversity of the group (some people getting bored because they find it easy, some people giving up because they struggle and they see that other people do it easily…). The given importance to the grading system as a measure of success…
Thank you for the recommendation, it looks great!
Jose, great post, not only because of the care you put into writing it, but validating the exercise of introducing yourself. I am going to point out in class your post.