That’s a billboard I must pass a dozen or more times a month, but I only recently noticed it. Clearly in these hard economic times, the U is really trying to push distance learning… but this attempt feels more like a feeble shove than a real push.

There’s several other billboards around town, most noticeably the one on I-275 downtown that makes me feel like I’m about to launch into near-Earth orbit. They also had a real big outdoor ad campaign during football season, where they tried to implant the respective images of Matt Grothe and George Selvie into everybody’s brain. During any type of USF game on TV, there’s also a commercial they run made with still photographs (remind you of anything?) and music that sounds like Kraftwerk (unfortunately no one has deemed it interesting enough to post it to YouTube).

I bring this up in order to contrast it with the commercials that Kaplan University have been rolling out:

Really, they’re just breathtaking. Others have reacted similarly, some even go so far as to call it e-learning’s equivalent to Apple’s 1984 ad. It did come with a hefty price tag: the cost for the campaign was supposedly in the millions.

I’m not asking USF to spend that kind of cash. I only ask that they heed some advice from Uncle Phil:

As of late, the local news media has been running a number of “holy crap, it’s a recession! Why is [insert public agency] spending your tax dollars on [insert derogatory adjective] art while they’re facing a [insert random number] million dollar shortfall?!!” Apparently, they assume their viewers cannot grasp the concept of budget allocation that takes place months or years in advance.

10 Connects (the bizarre new name for our local CBS affiliate) ran a story last night (my apologies if their embedded video takes long to load – their player doesn’t seem as efficient as YouTube’s) about the new $27,000 topiary bull sitting in front of the new Marshall Center. The pictures don’t really do it justice – I drove by it last week, and I honestly think it looks pretty dope. It’s a nice touch for our campus, which frankly looks like a giant office park (with the exception of MLK plaza). Based on comments to the 10 Connects story, and on a similar story run by the Oracle, it would seem I am in the minority.

As an aside, I actually have nothing personal against 10 Connects – I interviewed for a job there once, and tend prefer their newscasts over their competitors.

The local ABC affiliate ran a similar story last week about the upcoming Lights On Tampa light show, which projects the work of animators and video artists onto various buildings around downtown. The project cost an incredible amount of money, though the majority comes from private donors. The rest comes from the state (money that can’t be spent on anything else), and about $70,000 comes from the city. Seems a small price to pay to spruce up a city that is about to host a very small game of American football called the Super Bowl (perhaps you’ve heard of it?).

I was walking around downtown last Friday and managed to see a surreal sequence of people hanging out on the sidewalk (surreal at least, for Tampa) in front of the new Skypoint condo building. First I walked past skinny hipsters sprawled out on outdoor couches in front of a trendy-looking wine bar. About 15 feet later, I walked past an overweight homeless woman doing a word search on a bench crammed with grocery bags (filled with what I assumed were all her worldly possessions).

A couple questions sprang to mind: First, where the hell did this wine bar and all these hipsters come from? Second, how do both these sets of people coexist footsteps apart, seemingly oblivious to each other?

For about 4 months, I worked in downtown Tampa and frequently spent time after work aimlessly walking the city, occasionally dropping by the library or going to the Forum to buy hockey tickets. The one thing that seemed pervasive, even after big events or after 5pm when most of the workers would leave, was the homeless. I think this may explain just why Tampa’s homeless is probably the most chilled out homeless population I’ve ever encountered – they pretty much own the place.

In places like New York or Chicago, I have been harassed – even after handing over the change in my pocket. In Orlando (the only other downtown I have spent significant time in), I was once bothered by a guy who kept calling me “Mr. Wally” and wouldn’t leave until I gave him five bucks.

I’m glad that there are hipsters moving in, spending their money, and injecting some semblance of life into the place at night. But at the same time, I’m a little concerned that maybe they’ll end up displacing those who are already there after 5pm.

Yes, the blog is called “design:learning” so I’ll bring it back around to the topic: in last summer’s Interactive Media course I had to do usability studies on an instructional website, and the one that I found was gcflearnfree.org, a killer site run by Goodwill that has free instructional modules for learning basic computer and life skills. It’s a great example of the positive things that we can do in this industry.

Web-based instruction may seem like an improper delivery method for helping the homeless, but all of the homeless using computers inside John F. Germany library downtown would seem to suggest otherwise.

Photo is of the Maas Bros. Dept store, which was tore down in order to build new condos almost 3 years ago. Unsurprisingly, there are no condos there yet, just a vacant lot. It felt like an appropriate photo.