 Welcome to our Web Programming and Information Architecture Pathway and Q&A with advisors. Today's workshop is part of our pathway series introducing the different MLIS career pathways where you'll get an insight perspective from instructors who have worked in specific fields. So let's get started with our agenda. Today's agenda consists of an overview of the Web Programming and Information Architecture Pathway which courses students can consider, why, how students use the skill set, and then we'll meet faculty with expertise in this area who have made themselves available to answer your questions. So what is Web Programming and Information Architecture? Well, it concentrates on the theories and basic concepts and tools and supporting techniques related to the design, building and management of information systems and web applications. It also includes design and development of user-centered information systems and a variety of information environments, along with web applications, web and web programming languages. So here's a list of the core theory and knowledge that students pursuing the pathway would benefit from in building skill sets toward a career in this area. Analyze and determine library computing requirements, develop new means of delivering service, coordinate and implement new electronic services, and support ongoing services, along with identify specific needs for technologies in information search and management, along with understand computing fundamentals, data structures, operating systems, usability issues, website design and creation and web programming scripting languages, and finally master the tools and concepts necessary to work with a team. Foundational course details are on the website in yellow, and recommended courses such as Info 241, Automated Library Services, and Info 247, Vocabulary Design. So now I'll turn it over to Sheila. Thanks, Taryn. So our program advisory committee for this pathway has determined three areas of emphasis within the web programming and information architecture pathway, which some students may find useful in order to target their developing skill sets for an eventual job search in one of three areas. Managing databases and the integrated library system, website development and social media management, and finally user experience. Now while all of our students earn an MLIS degree from the school, no special designation will appear on the academic transcripts or diplomas. Students might include areas of emphasis information about their skill sets on resumes or in cover letters during the job search. Now whether you'd like to pursue database management, web programming, or user experience work in academic or public libraries, government, or even corporate work settings, the MLIS Skills at Work report found on the iSchool website has you covered with valuable analyses that will help you prepare yourself for the job marketplace. The report found that specific technology skills are in demand in both traditional library and in non-traditional jobs. Among other insights, the report found that 16% of the jobs surveyed required web services and programming HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CSEO analytics as required technology skills. And data analysis tools included Python, R, SPSS, Power BI, ArcGIS, Tableau, Data Studio. They were listed in 12% of the postings. And application programming tools such as SQL, Java, Perl, PHP, Ruby, MS Windows, Unix, Linux, Oracle were found in 9% of advertised positions. So page 48 through 51 of this report offers specific strategies and suggestions for job seekers that go beyond taking specific pathway courses. Our students can set up job alerts to come into their email with specific keywords for this pathway for jobs mentioned in the MLIS Skills report such as UX Librarian, Information Architect, or User Experience Designer. Here on the slide are just a few recent job sample job titles that I found on indeed.com. Now students can set up a folder with their saved targeted job descriptions and target the specific technologies, knowledge, skills, and abilities that you think would add and cultivate to your skill set through your coursework and your internship experiences. You can also add these to your wish list of classes in your student success planner. Now one of the takeaways from this report was the following advice. Monitor trends and technology skills and prepare to master new technologies and emerging ones. Practice learning on demand methods as part of each new course that you take. If you can, try to fit in an Info294 in-person or virtual for credit internship into your program planning or volunteer to develop your web technology skills. Do not forget to tap into all the career development supports and other resources that the school has put into place for MLIS students. A few are listed here on the slide, but a good way to organize your efforts is to make use of the career planning checklist inside your student success planner. In this way, you can set goals and milestones specific to your own career objectives. And now's the time for you to have an opportunity to hear tips and recommendations from our experts in this pathway. Three faculty who teach courses on this pathway are here with us today. First, they will introduce themselves and let you know a little bit about their background with web programming and information architecture. And then some tips learned from their leadership roles in their careers as well as specific tips on high school courses or technology trends or maybe even extracurricular or service learning opportunities that they would like to recommend to you. And so we will begin with their presentations and then later we'll be opening it up for Q&A. First up, we'll pass it over to Dr. Liu. Everybody, first I want to apologize in advance that my connection may get interrupted because I'm joining the meeting from Tianjin, China for other reasons that you all know. With that, so I'm going to try to speak as much as I could before I get cut off. I have been with the faculty for almost 30 years now and since the start I've been teaching technology oriented courses. I used to even teach a C program, sound engine, job and among the way I've been teaching database design and later got into data mining with Robin Miner. So I consider myself to be a techie guy and I've been closely associated with the technology track in the program. And so basically currently two courses besides the 202, one is the 242 which is more about designing a relational database and implemented on the Oracle platform. The other one is the 246 that's focused on data mining using a Robin Miner studio which is a GUI interface programming platform for you to process. So I'll stop here and hand over to our next speaker. Thank you so much, Dr. Liu and Professor Steve Perry. It is your turn. All right, I've been with the college. Gosh, it's been about 21 years now. I'm part-time here and I like Dr. Liu who's full-time and we used to have so many database students back in the early 2000s. I got to teach a section of Info 242 back then. We had enough students for it but it is, I highly recommend his course. Oops, I thought I had the video on. I'll try that again. I highly recommend his course because database is fundamental to anything that you're going to do to store and retrieve data even with web programming or web design and you're just going to need that. So that's very important as a base. I created a SQL course that we used to teach here at San Jose State but now I think they found another instructor to teach it in the summers only. It's just in basic SQL and I think they use MySQL there. So that's important and Dr. Liu teaches the Oracle SQL. All brands, if you will, or versions of SQL are very close to each other. Probably 85% of them are the same and the different platforms that you might use, Oracle, Microsoft, MySQL, that sort of thing. So that's sort of fundamental to information to get things stored and retrieved and I really understand that. And then we get into programming. Actually, I often call the web the marriage of publishing and programming because there's the visual component, obviously the HTML and CSS, the styling language that helps present there. We have an Info 240 course. I think it is where we offer several sections of that that teach how to put up a good face, put up a good website that looks appropriate. I do recommend that. I know the instructors for that is not here in this presentation but highly recommended. If you know that, that just helps to have a good feel of how to put together a web page and how to style it so it looks appropriate. But underneath it, web pages that just are pretty pictures don't do much. So you need programming if you want to go ahead and do something like if you were on Amazon.com wanted to buy a book and then you enter your address and your credit card information and what have you. All that is put on web forms where the programs that live on a server somewhere, as I like to call it the great computer in the sky, the cloud computing, right? So programs live up there on a server, another computer and they receive the information, process it and then return back to the user who's ever using your website back a new page usually that has the information to take the next step in whatever process you're doing like buying something on Amazon. So there are a number of languages that are very popular in the industry for doing this kind of programming. As Dr. Lou mentioned, Java is one of them. I don't think at our program, we're teaching server side Java right now, but it is one of the larger languages, also Microsoft's C plus, which again, I'm not sure if we offer a particular course on that. The two areas that we do offer the classes that I'm teaching, one is they're all under the banner of Info 246, that's sort of a catch all number to hold a number of things related to programming and technology. And so the first one there you see listed is the one that's on building web applications using PHP and Java script. Now it's a real fundamentals course. It doesn't go into deep, real deep depth, but PHP is a server side programming language where you'll get to read information off web forms, process them in some way, and then return to the user the response based on the processing. Like yes, success, you bought the book, or no, please remember to fill in your street address, whatever the validation that's taking place. Now Java script is not done on a server, not usually computer server, it's usually run actually locally on the person's computer. It's downloaded and run there. So it's a browser based language and it's very good for usability items. You can do some minor validation, like if someone's missing information in a field, you can catch that before information gets sent up to the cloud server to be processed. So you can do a little bit of work. Also it does some visual look and feel, things to make things friendly or easier to use. So we used to teach these separately under 246, PHP and Java script, but just decided that this would be a better presentation for people starting out. It's definitely introductory in nature. Now the hot language nowadays, this is the language that has saved my career, not just with San Jose State, but with the other place that I work, Palomar Community College down in San Diego County. And that is Python. Python is like right now the hot, hot, hot language for so many things. I teach a two unit Python course that's definitely introductory in nature. It shows you how to put the language together basically in an eight week period. It does not explicitly go into how to do web programming with Python, but that is done. And there are various frameworks for that. Like it's called Django, of course, it's spelled with a D Django frameworks for doing that kind of programming. And maybe we'll have that in the future, but right now we don't offer that specifically. You learn the basic language skills, then it's usually, if you take to it and you like programming, it's usually not super hard to begin to go out on your own after taking an introductory class and find the skills or framework you need to do web development with Python using something like Django. And so it's a big language. It's used a lot also for just data science applications in general, very good in cybersecurity. It's kind of one of these languages that seems to be used everywhere. Often another big application is graphic information systems, which can, of course, have a web component because using GIS applications very visual. Very often you want to see cities that are greater than 10,000 and they might be highlighted in yellow or raised in red or something to highlight on a map in a graphic information systems. So those are the two most useful web development languages that we're teaching here in our program. But I wanted to let you know about the others. Before I forget, there's another website. You had mentioned that indeed.com. But for techie jobs, one that's been out there for a couple of decades at least is called dice.com, D-I-C-E, like rolling dice. And it is all about technology. All the job postings are things about programming, web development, other computer programming languages. So it's a very good website for that kind of employment. And you can narrow it down by area code, geographic areas and what have you or they're online or not. So it's a really friendly tool to use. And I highly recommend it if you're looking for either looking for a job or looking for the kind of skill sets that people are hiring for. So you can know what to concentrate on in your own training. And let's see. And I guess that's the basics of what I wanted to say. And of course I'll take any questions whenever question time is. I assume that's after everybody speaks. So let me know. Okay. That's it for now. Super. Thank you for going through all the ins and outs. And we're delighted to welcome Dr. Tucker to speak on her courses and a little bit more about the pathway. Number two, unmute. It's always so interesting to hear from other faculty. I always learn a little bit more. I have worked with Dr. Liu for quite a while. So we know each other fairly well. And I really appreciate your introductions, Sheila and Taryn. Thank you very much for that. So they asked me to say a little bit about my background. So I'll do that briefly. It's been kind of a quilt of career segments in the information sciences. And when I got my master's in library science, my first real professional career was as an academic librarian. I worked in the area of physics, which had been my minor in study. My major as an undergrad was music, but I worked at Stanford. Oh, not ready for that slide. Sorry. Thank you. I'll get to that. First, I'm going to cover a few other things. And then I got very intrigued with online database industry and actually got recruited and worked for the big granddaddy of online databases called Dialog, which is part of ProQuest at this point. And I imagine you've used some ProQuest databases no matter where you are in the MLIS program. And I was their side tech specialist. I ended up doing training and then becoming manager of their training programs and doing computer-based training design, stand-up training. I traveled. I really enjoyed that side of it, but then I was also doing documentation. Eventually, I moved out of that area and into product development. And I was an information architect. So I had a lot to do with databases and search engine products moving onto the web and being targeted at different kind of user groups. So I learned about conducting user research, doing focus groups, doing all kinds of testing. And I was typically the person who did the prototyping and was the voice of the customer on product teams. So I interfaced a lot with software engineers, with marketing people, with licensing people. It was a really exciting position to be in. And I did that for quite a few years and then started teaching part-time for the School of Information and the first course I was teaching was the 244 course, online searching, you might know that. I no longer teach that. And then eventually started teaching the 202 Information Retrieval System Design course, which you've either taken, you are taking, or you're going to take because everybody takes that one. And I'm currently the coordinator for that course. It's one of the required core courses. And there are currently 11 faculty teaching it. So I take care of the materials and training new faculty to come up to speed on that. Dr. Liu is one of the very experienced faculty who teaches that course. And I'm just busy training two new instructors for that. So it seems like I've been in various different environments, which is true. I worked in industry for over 25 years. But it all kind of comes together and I think represents very well all the different environments that someone with an MLIS can work in. I did go back and do a PhD when I was in my late 50s through the Gateway program at the iSchool. So that's kind of a cheer for the Gateway PhD program. If any of you are thinking of doing that, I'd be happy to talk with you or you can talk to the current coordinator, Dr. Sue Allman. I used to be the PhD program coordinator, but it was an opportunity for me because I needed to keep working full time because I was raising children and be able to do a doctoral program, which made it possible for me to end up as a professor at the iSchool. It didn't just sort of happen. I make it sound like it did. What I'd like to emphasize before we move on to the next slide is something Sheila covered, and that is the importance of internships in your journey through the MLIS. If it's at all possible to fit one in, it can really strengthen what your opportunities can be. Whether you're trying to do a pivot in your career that you currently have going, or if you're looking for brand-new opportunities, an internship can make all kinds of differences in that situation that you have, your own personal situation. The other thing that goes hand-in-hand with that are graduate assistantships. These notices go out and it's often working with a faculty member. They might have a research project. I have a posting out right now. I'm looking for someone to work with me in spring semester, but those can give you a similar kind of experience. The Student Research Journal is another one of those kinds of opportunities to give you some real-world experience that can be very valuable. So I wanted to underscore what Sheila covered there. As to the courses I currently teach, I do teach in the Master of Science in Informatics program now. I teach a Human-Centered Design course. That's IMFM204. And again, I mentioned the 202 course I teach and coordinate. And then I teach one of these courses that Steve mentioned, the 246 series that has a whole range of courses within it. The one I teach is Information Architecture. And then I do advise in ePortfolio, the 289 course that almost everyone does. There are few who will do a thesis. So the other thing I wanted to cover is the important role of program advisory committees. And that's next slide, please. Thank you. So there are important ways that we keep our curriculum current and reflective of different work environments and trends. So I call this informing the curriculum. We have multiple program advisory committees that are aligned with the career pathways. So we're talking about specific pathways today. But there are other pathways and different environments. Or there might be a program advisory committee for a specific program, such as the teacher librarian program. And each committee contributes insights to the work environments that they know about or trends that they're aware of, things that they see developing. The one that's most relevant here to what we're discussing is called the Knowledge Organization Program Advisory Committee. There are others that are also very closely touched on our topic today. This is one that I know well because I co-chair it. And you can see here the committee members that I've listed. And these do change. They usually serve for a few years. But these folks represent a lot of different environments. We have Patricia DeCruz, who's actually the first two or graduates of the program. Patricia is a taxonomy specialist at Cisco. And Corey Lawrence is a search analyst at Apple Computer. And then Krista Bailey is one of the librarians at King Library on campus. I've also recently recruited Andrea Medina-Smith. She's one of our PhD students in the Gateway program. And she's a data librarian at NIST. So we've got some, you know, government, we've got industry, we've got academia. And then Annie Wu is head of metadata and digitization at University of Houston Library. So we always try and get someone who's also from tech services in academic library settings. We've had a number of really fabulous people who give their time and expertise in serving on the committee. So this is one way that we keep the curriculum up to date. We meet with them and show them, you know, what we're thinking about. We show them the career pathway pages on the website. And as for their input, it's a really valuable part of how the iSchool works and how it brings in people from the outside who are really invested in the quality of the programs we offer. As you know, and this might be a big reason why you chose San Jose State's iSchool for your MLIS. We have a lot of courses. I mean, we really do. We have a lot of faculty, a lot of part-time faculty like Steve Perry. But there's so many courses. Sometimes it's really hard to choose. I advise with students who say, you know, I'd like to take these six courses, but I really can only fit in two of them. Help me decide because we have so many electives. And this is, you know, I think a real strength of the program. So the other thing I wanted to mention is in terms of advising, there are specialists for particular subject areas. And then there are generalists, people who are willing to just sort of help you out. If you're at the beginning of the program, that might be a really good thing to do is set up a time or just reach out via email to one of the generalists who are listed on the advising page that has the advisor names and what their special areas are, the dropdown where you can say, here's what I'm interested in. But it also has, I think, four or five names of faculty who are willing to advise no matter what, who are the generalists. And that's what I wanted to cover. So we've got, thanks for putting the link in there, Sheila. Super. So that's it for me. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for sharing your tale of being a Renaissance person through the academic and corporate worlds. And that is so valuable. So now at this point, everyone, we're ready to go and step into our Q&A portion. And this is a time for you to get advice from any of our panelists who are all experts in the curriculum and the pathway. So our Q&A should be open, ready to go. If you want, you can access it from the strip at the bottom of your window, the Q&A. Click that, and then we'll just go ahead and I will read the questions and you can let us know if it's for a specific faculty or if it's open to all the panelists to answer. So I guess while we're waiting for questions to come in, oh, here we go. We've got our first question. Okay. The question is, how is this pathway different from related ones such as data science, digital curation, digital services, and emerging technologies? But any of our panelists like to take this one on? Steve, you know, the web program could include all of those things that you've listed, their data science and digital services and everything. It's just basically the version of it that's presented through web applications. So you need those skills. Things can be, you know, data science, for example, could be just done a desktop or client server application where you're talking to a database on the server, but the application is a desktop application. So the web part of what we're doing today is really the tools you use to take that application and present it over the internet, over the web. Yeah. If we speak about the whole thing from the web program and perspective, Steve explained pretty well that if everything is going to go through the web and it's going to be about the web and the data is going to come from the web or off the web, then the whole thing, all the other tracks that you mentioned would end up getting tangled with the web program. But however, each of those other technology-oriented pathways that would have its own focus, take the big data or data science, for example, it does not have to be, or does not need to be limited to web related stuff. For example, in a typical library setting, you would have a huge data pile sitting somewhere. Circulation records is apparent to the one, and you can make some use of that. You can mine that for patterns, and you can analyze that for evidence to make decisions in your library settings. They don't need to be limited to web programming, but if they are going to be from or are going to be through the web interface or web portal of the organization, then it will get somehow interacted with the web program. Typical things, for example, let's say if you want to do a survey of your local community, then it certainly makes sense to build a web portal and to gather input from the community, and then you can go on to analyze the data using the data science skills that you have learned. That's just one example. The point I'm trying to make is that the other technology pathways would each have their own focus, and D means a package of related skills that might have some overlapping with the web track, but they are not exactly the same. I hope they manage to get the point across here. I thought that was an excellent explanation. Dr. Tucker, do you have some thoughts? Yeah, I just wanted to add in terms of kind of the purpose of those career pathways is not to say you need to pick one or pick two and split your choices of courses or your choices of where you want to work. But to help guide your decision of course selections, but to think about like the job titles or the job report and directions you might go in, but you don't need to choose one and say I'm going in the direction of emerging technologies, which is really like an umbrella in today's world. Everything has emerging technologies within it. So I just wanted to clarify that or the way both Jeffrey and Steve described the web as a place where we do a lot of our living and playing and interacting with each other is in many ways a distribution place for things that might happen in digital services. They might be doing a lot of processing of information, but might then be distributed in that way. So I just wanted to state that about the purpose behind career pathways. Thank you. And just everyone, we've talked about this before in other workshops, but just remembering that you have ultimate flexibility to pick and choose from the career pathways, which are just there as guides for students. And so we even have a tool, which is our pathway crossover tool that shows intersection. If you're interested in more than one pathway, use this tool to pull up a customized list of courses that have recommended, sorry, of pathways that have recommended courses in common to each other. So then you can kind of kill two birds with one stone, as you might say. We'll move on to the next question then. The next question is, what are your thoughts on how AI will impact this track's career opportunities in the future? And Professor Perry is going to address this. Interestingly, I got really into AI over the past year. And I gave a presentation to faculty at the other college that I worked at. About 200 people showed up one and know how it was going to affect education in particular. But one of the things that came out of my readings and stuff is this tool is going to be around for people to work with. And the rule is that AI won't take your job, but somebody using AI will. So it behooves students ultimately at some point to learn how to use these tools in a beneficial way. It presents some unique challenges to education, because we want the students to go through the process of learning how to do something thoroughly and not rely on tools like AI to do it for them. Unfortunately, from the standpoint of education, AI can write a perfectly good Python program or other programs. You can just pretty much ask it a question, give it the criteria, and it will write out a perfectly working program. Now, and so in my classes in particular, I have some guidelines on where using AI to get some enhancing knowledge is OK. But I've got some guidelines for myself and for them on how to prevent them from using it to do all the work. And that's important as well. You wouldn't want to go to a doctor and say, give them your symptoms. And they say, well, I don't know. Let's see what chat GPT says. And he'd never gone to med school. You'd be pretty nervous about that. So anybody who wants to work in web technologies or any other technology really, had better have a pretty good base of understanding it. And then you can make use of these AI tools as an enhancement. Unfortunately, in their current incarnation, it's really just getting started. They can be very, very inaccurate. And you really have to double check a lot. If anything is critical, what you're using them for, that making a mistake would be bad. You can't rely on them perfectly. Now, one day over the different successes of AI tools in the future, hopefully that problem will be addressed more and more and people have more confidence in the tool. And they're coming up with specialized AI chatbots, if you will, for medicine and law and things like that, that maybe you'll have more confidence in that they've been accurate. But as a programmer, computer programmer, I am doing a couple of little side projects just for myself. And it has been very useful to already know how to program and then use these tools to make the programming go quicker. It doesn't do everything for me, but it does little parts and test things out. I think, hey, this is great. I can right now, maybe 30% faster than I used to be able to work. So they are out there. People are going to be expecting them employers. They're going to expect that you have some sense of how to use these tools. Obviously, the famous one, chat GPT. There's, of course, Google's Bard, Microsoft Bing, which uses kind of the same thing as chat GPT, but not completely. And then there's Claude and Perplexity. And there's a bunch of other ones out there. So it's worth keeping on top of it. There's one newsletter in particular called AI Rundown. I don't have the address for that right now, but AI Rundown. And it's a good little thing to get in your inbox once a day. And it just kind of keeps you up on things that are coming out there. It's a page or two. It's nothing overwhelming to read. But I recommend that you might look that up and just kind of keep up on at least overall what's going on with AI in the future. So it is a new world with this. And we're going to have to dance to keep on top of it, both as educators, obviously, and students, but going future as being employed at different places, you're going to need to know how to use it and understand it. All right, that's it. Any other comments from panelists? Or we will move to the next. I just wanted to add since kind of the area I'm in is that user research UX side is, I think, there's still going to be demand for people doing that kind of work. And I think AI can really help with writing up reports and doing drafts and then the human side of finalizing. And that can be really helpful because writing skills and collaborative skills are still in demand. I like to think that will still be true, but the drafting can certainly be important. We do have a policy now at the iSchool that if a chat GBT or other AI tool is used that it needs to be cited. I implemented that in my classes this fall and showed how to cite a tool and how it might be used and it's especially interesting in my informatics course I teach, which is a design course and it's kind of the standout in that program of not being a technology course. It's focused on design, although they use technology tools. So I just wanted to bring that up for the UX area and user research. So we still care about people and what they want and what we can sell to them. I just want to kind of keep everybody cool and calm. Just like any other technology hype, we will not be a really know the answer to that question until the dust settles. And we have a tendency to become overly enthusiastic about emerging technologies and as we have experienced over and over. Now the other thing that I want to keep in mind is that this whole thing of AI is no more than learn what is already out there. It's about discovering bad pattern and then associate that pattern with a course of action that has already been documented somewhere on the web. So it can really solve a problem for you that has not already been solved by somebody else and posted somewhere in writing on the web. So with that said, you can see that as long as we can preserve the creative and original core of our profession and I don't think the AI is going to have much impact. Thank you all. Okay, we will go to the next question, which Professor Perry is also going to answer. All right, that's good. Yeah, I agree with just before answering this next question. I agree with what Dr. Lou said. My view of the AI is that it's overhyped and overfeared. It will have a place in the world and may get better over time. But it does not think for itself. It uses things and patterns that other humans have already thought of. Like you said, it's not a sentient entity. It may feel like that to some people because it was almost like a magic trick. But everything that it puts out has been put there by another human in some way. In some way. So yeah, they're not all out to get us. I'm going to take over the robots not yet. So back about the question was put in here about Python being in demand now and an experience. Yeah, I've been programming now. We're getting up on 46 years. I started programming professionally. And languages that are very popular do hang around for quite a bit. Java was the real hot thing in the mid-90s. And Java is still there. People don't talk about it with the same buzz that they used to have. But you can get a perfectly good job coding Java, not JavaScript, although you can do that as well. JavaScript's been around for almost as long. And PHP is a language that had some buzz and it's still good for generally smaller websites, not the really large, what they call enterprise level, large corporation sites. That's more likely to be a Microsoft solution like C Sharp, which is still out there. And still plenty of employment in that and likewise. So Python has been around for a while. It just, I guess, has become very useful in a lot of different places, especially data science and cybersecurity. And it's just sort of got buzz. But I expect it to be around for quite some time. You know, maybe something else will come along five years from now that gets the buzz and is the really hot, hot language that everybody wants to learn about. But these other really mainstay languages aren't going away. When I started in the 1977 teaching, I was using a language called COBOL on mainframe computers. Now that language has definitely diminished over the years. There aren't as many mainframe programmers anymore, but I used it solid up until around 1995. I was working for a utility company, Southern California Edison. I worked professionally for 24 years as a programmer before becoming a full-time teacher. And so even today, if you work for the government and the IRS, there's still a lot of COBOL programs. So most of these things never completely die. You know, just keep, like I said, these sites like dice.com and other job sites, you can look to them and keep your finger on the pulse of the industry. And even read a trade magazine like Computer World or something like that or online. You'll get a sense if something is rising and if you need to watch that, you know, as a career shift strategy. Just really briefly, I'd like to tell the story when Bill Clinton was elected president and he started in 1993, he formed a commission of business leaders to talk about where business is going. So he could align government within needs of business. And they came up with this great report and there wasn't a word about the internet. Okay, it was 1993. Two years later, the internet had taken all over the whole world by storm. So things can change. It's good to pay attention. Okay. Great. Okay, we'll go to the next one. I've been seeing more about post-relational databases and struggling with the idea. Will studying relational database theory and structure have some application to the logic of post-relational databases? I'd be happy to take that if you would like. Yes. Okay. They've been talking about post-relational for a long time. And there are things out there like object-oriented databases. There's certainly things for specialized applications like when you do a Google search, they don't use a relational database. They have their own thing to make things happen quickly. You know, there's what is it? No SQL. There's other things out there, but nothing seems to be bumping relational databases off its throne. I taught my first SQL class, which is what we use to work with relational databases in 1997. They created one for another community college, started teaching it, and it's still, I'm still teaching it and it's still a super popular class always fills up very fast. People need to know SQL and understand relational database as a base. So I would definitely get those skills first. And then, you know, look, you might look at others if you have a particular niche interest in something, but otherwise I'm not seeing any sign that relational database is going to be the throne anytime in the near future. Hey, thank you. We had a question about the recording and the content and we will be adding this recording to our channel on our playlist on YouTube for student services and outreach. So you can look forward to that in the next week or two. Do any of our attendees have additional questions? We do have a couple more minutes. I'd like to ask the panelists, are there soft skills or skills that are not, you know, specifically defined on this pathway that you'd like to touch on or recommend as far as, you know, non-technical skills that maybe students pursuing this pathway need to sharpen up or learn more about for success in this pathway? I would just share one bit of my experience through all these years. One thing I learned is that technology is never about the technology itself. It's always used for some kind of purpose. It's always applied in some kind of domain. So your strand, it's going to come not only from your technology skills, but also knowledge from a related field or related domain. So it's always used in some kind of combination. If you somehow can work out a combination of a subject area, a domain area, plus the technology skills that you can build in that web-track courses, then you will be better off. And Dr. Tucker? Yeah. No, I just echo what Dr. Lou said. I think in terms of soft skills, some of the most important ones are being able to work in a group because very little is done as an individual. And it's something I really emphasize in my classes is, and being able to work virtually, which our program certainly supports that, communication across time zone. There are fewer signals that you have to communicate and also to take advantage of tools like Zoom because every now and then I'll get a student project group and they say, well, we're just going to use Discord. We're not going to meet in real time. We're not going to hold any actual meetings face-to-face. And usually the work does not benefit from that. I mean, I think there's... And it's a skill that needs to be developed to understand what it means to inventory the skills of the group, understand what it means to kind of push your own boundaries and say, I really want to develop this skill of mine. And within a group project, that can be a way to do that. So I would emphasize that that's a super important so-called soft skill and empathy. I think empathy is... There's never enough of that. I totally agree with what you're saying there, Dr. Tucker. That in the real world, you might get to go off and work a little bit by yourself, but you're always going to have to work with a team just about any job I've ever had that involved that. And so the basic rules of be kind and be someone that other people would want to work with. Get along with people and those dynamics will go a long way towards making someone want to hire you. Yeah, be able to interact with the human beings and be able to communicate effectively with the human beings would be a great plus. And especially in a possible supporting role that we're going to play as a technologies expert. Yeah, excellent. Well, we have only a couple more minutes. If there are any final thoughts from any of our panelists, any specific professional organizations you want to put a shout out to or anything final thoughts, please feel free. The floor is yours. Well, I think going to conferences is really important. It's so nice that they're in person now. I mean, I've had so many things develop out of conference attendance that was not because I was at a session or giving a session or on a panel. It was just sort of these serendipity kinds of interactions. So if you can do it, I would really encourage that now. Yeah, definitely. I would encourage you all to learn about the new things, even just kind of shopping around in a conference to kind of stay on top of things. You don't need to become an expert. You don't need to dive deep. But just to get a feeling, a general, intuitive understanding of how things work would help you down the road. We're coming. It's always fun to talk about this profession and field lots of different areas. Thank you, everyone. Thank you to our three talented panelists. We're so lucky to have you here at the iSchool. So, so lucky. And thank you to our co-moderator Taryn. We will be rendering this recording and it will be available within the next few weeks on our YouTube channel. So thanks, everyone, for spending a little bit of their day with us today to learn more about the web programming and information architecture field. So take care, everyone. Have a great rest of your day.