Stephen H. Wilson

I just posted the long review below. As I was looking at it and the other posts on this instructor, I noticed one of the reviewers had posted nearly 3000 other entries. Wow, that is a serious college student! Then I looked at another review. Same number. Someone is double dipping! Dude, they are *all* the same number. What gives? R they the same person or what? Apt to make a girl a little sqeamish...

I know a few other reviewers liked Steve a lot and that is cool. He can be good. Overall, though, I thought both his classes and the department under his steering left a bit to be desired.

I felt Steve was a tad sexist although not really on purpose or without redemption. Just that he was a bit assuming that important work was neccessarily by males. If questioned, he was not overt about it but I know a few of us in my group of women students thought he could have made us feel more like we mattered.

Steve does great tutorials online and in print and so forth but much of *our* classes (I took 3 with him since they were required for my major) were spent having us look up information for him out of his textbook when he got the code wrong. Lectures were not really very productive yet he would be irate with those who bailed on his class even if he was not able to deliver information needed for the assignments and class was irrelevant to the assignment neccessitating going outside of class to get the information needed. It would be better to just get the books, IMO. His books were actually quite good.

In his web class, he insisted on using macs exclusively and had no idea how to deal with a the student who only had PCs. In fact, he outright refused to answer any questions or do any research to bridge this huge deficeit in his knowledge and left these students to either drop the course to take it in the computer department where they WILL cover the information or figure it out themselves (again, he would become upset if you bailed on class despite the material you needed to know being absent from the curriculum).

Until a few years ago, be insisted on using this program that would only run on very very very old macs to teach essentially Director or Flash-style animation. Hypercard! It was unbelievable. A completely useless program that used programming that was un-transferable to anything you might possibly use that is remotely professional. So we spent an entire semester doing THAT when we could have been learning Director.

One thing I did like about Steve, though, was that he did announcements of local things going on in the area that might be of interest or further our education. That was very useful. And it was a tremendous resource and public service.

The department under his leadership took a bit of a header I thought. Although Conceptual Design is officially listed as a fine art and taught - allegedly - as such through the years of study, the senior project was not in keeping with this at *all*. In fact, it was to get a job in some high tech firm which was never the proported goal of the program at any stage as far as I could ascertain. No fine art project, just get a job. Which you would be better equipped to get had you gone through similar courses that do not emphasize fine arts in the computer arts department AND no Hypercard! So the department, ultimately, failed to live upto the fine arts heading and instead tried to present itself in terms of employable skills but failed to offer differentiation in positive ways from the CA (computer arts) dept while adopting the same goal (employability).

Overall, CD (conceptual design) was an interesting major and I learned a lot although not so much thanks to Steve Wilson, but in spite of him. I and many of my compadres spent a great deal of time outside of the class reading up on the things he refused to teach us in the classes or else that he ended up being unable to teach us because he spent the entire class periods (plural) trying to figure out the code, having students read him the code out of books HE allegedly wrote, and (as often as not) trying to fix the computer when it turns out the machine was not plugged in the entire time and class ends without anything being accomplished and the project based on the lecture is due the following class.

I'm not saying he didn't have his good points. And cd, if nothing else, can be used as a study guide to list and have a time line of things to learn that are quite useful. But it does not have the purported fine art bent as much as might be desired and they do offer similar and more thorough classes of the non-fine art variety through the non-fine art computer courses which are very strong at this school. I and many of my friends spent a great deal of time out of class finding alternative ways to learn the material we were supposed to be going over in class. And I found his sexism less than charming. Although it WAS pretty cool that the FBI pulled him out of class one day to question his as to whether or not he was the unibomber. I am not saying it wasn't a good time!

Steve is extremely easy going and easy to talk to. I was having problems with learning the applications but he didn't give me a hard time about not completing the work in a speedy fashion. He gave me an incomplete as I asked, and when I did complete the class he offered to give me a C. I was ecstatic and grateful for the C (what a burden off my shoulders!) and would recommend his class to anyone.

He is very supportive and attentive. He'll go off on wierd tangents during lectures though, but he brings it right back into the subject. You can gauge his stress level by looking at his hair. Some say he looks like the Uni-Bomber, but he's not. He is very approachable.

Steve Wilson is a nice guy with a lot of great ideas and technical expertise. However, he often asks too much of his students in that they must learn Photoshop, Illustrator, lingo, etc., before even begining the large projects he assigns. To get the most from this class, just make sure that you know the basics of computer graphics & sound before signing up.