Dear Convergence,

Convergence, you need to put an end to this, immediately.

It doesn't matter how, but it's time to either clean up your act or bring it to a close.

For the last few days I've been talking to a guy who was assigned to build a custom Wordpress theme for his Convergence capstone. He bought a book, started working, and quickly ran into trouble.

So I took a look at the code, and it wasn't wrong, it was just full of little odd things. The CSS was double-spaced, there were CSS descriptors that would work if only the element they described appeared on the page.

In other words, he didn't actually know CSS, and as we went over this, he started to realizing exactly how deep in over his head he was.

This wouldn't be that bad, except it's becoming a pattern.

I don't know what Convergence is supposed to be. I don't know if they want their graduates to know how to build a website, or a Flash application, or edit video well. But whatever they think Convergence Journalists should be able to do, they should actually teach them how to do it.

Throwing people into a situation where they're expected to create a professional quality website with no prior xhtml/css experience is the equivelant of sending someone out to shoot a story for KOMU when they've never used a camera before.

To be fair, I'm self taught on everything but Avid. But that takes time, research, practice, and a couple projects that can stay far away from my portfolio.

And yes, I throw myself into these positions all the time, but not without scoping them out first, and certainly not on any sort of deadline. The difference is I do it to myself, knowing exactly how involved the subject is and having plausible goals. These convergence people almost never have any idea what they're getting into.

A few months ago I met with a group of people working for KBIA with a nearly indentical problem. One girl was learning HTML from a book for the first time while she was supposed to be building them a new site from scratch.

Tonight a girl came into KOMU with a camera full of pictures to use in a Flash map. She's never used Flash before. I don't know how this is supposed to work.

The program has gone along for years banking on the idea that "look, we're new, and we're not sure what we are yet." But how many classes will be allowed to graduate who are supposed to be experts in online media, and no virtually nothing about how to make online media.

This isn't print or broadcast, where having some new media skills is an asset. New media is supposed to be their thing.

Under normal conditions, I'd write off my observations as, well, being me. We'll call this the iMovie effect. I think iMovie is the Ford Pinto of video editing software, but even I have to admit it does make it possible for people to edit video without spending any time learning how to do anything.

The problem is, almost everyone I've ever met in convergence has the exact same complaint.

[EDIT] Apparently this starting happening after a certain semester. Or people tend to be more critical of the whole program while they're in the middle of a crisis. [/EDIT]

That's telling.

- Jason