Not really but
Gord Nickerson made a joke in class today about how he'd probably go
home and read all about how he was the Worst Professor Ever on people's
blogs so I thought I'd oblige him (with my post title anyhow.)
I'm
pretty sure there are other profs beside him in the Department who
would take this title though. Heck, from what I hear, he's one of the better profs in the department. (Warning: linked page contains very irritating embedded video clip.)
“Managing Internet information Systems” actually looks like it'll
be a great class – we finally get to learn what blogs, wikis, RSS and
other assorted cutting-edge technologies are all about. After we
were dismissed today, a classmate summed up my feelings exactly: “This
is the class I thought 505 was going to be.” 505 is our
introductory computer course and it would be a great course – in
1992. To me, it's patently ridiculous that a Library and Information
Science program doesn't do more to give their students a working
knowledge of current information technologies. In my view, this
will be the single most important skill that they give to their
graduates and they're failing us by not giving us a basic familiarity
with things other than MS-Office and HTML. We shouldn't even be
learning today's cutting edge technologies, we need to know what's on
the horizon one year from now when we'll be entering the work
world. Even the fact that they're holding this course IN A
COMPUTER LAB where the students can follow along and fool around
themselves rather than sitting and watching an instructor “now you
click here” in a regular classroom is a vast improvement.
And don't get me started on how they don't utilize technology in the
delivery of their classes either. Every course should have a
class web site with a message board, assignments and lectures posted,
links to PDF's of suggested readings (get Sam Trosow on the legal team
when you're inevitably accused of violating copyright by doing so) and
so on. As far as I can tell, not one Mac computer is available
for students to work on. I did eventually find the USB drives on
the computers in the GRC but they're the old style in the back panel
instead of the new kind that are available in the front. So to
save work you're doing in the GRC, you have to get down on your hands
and knees, crawl under the desk and find the USB port in the back of
the tower. Here's another one – they have really old style
ergonomic keyboards on maybe 75% of the computers in the upstairs
lab. Yet when you go in there, students immediately fill up the
25% of the machines with the regular keyboards first. How much
does a keyboard cost? $25? Why not replace the crappy ones
and yes, you may cause more carpal tunnel syndrome but you'd also have
less frustrated students.
One of our assignments is to create a blog and I was a bit surprised
that I was the only person (out of ~30) who posted a link to my blog
when we were posting our contact info on the class web site (which is
pretty close to what all class web sites should be – readings,
assignments, lecture notes, message boards, links to a class blog and a
class wiki, etc.) Gord said people who have blogs already will
have to decide if they want to create a new one for the class or keep
going with their existing one as we have to do a lot of our reports on
our progress on our blogs. I think I'm going to stick with this
one and just create a category that I can tag all my 525-related posts with.
Okay, now I'm off to try and figure out if I can use Trillian as a
front-end for MSN which is another aspect of this course. I
haven't used an IM program since the heyday of ICQ so I've got a bit of
a learning curve ahead of me. I've added my professor as he
requested but it shows he's offline – not sure if this means he's
offline or if he has to approve my request to add him before he shows
up as being online or if I just did something wrong. So if anybody reading this is on MSN (or ICQ or AIM or Yahoo Messenger), please send me your contact info so I can try to add you.
Met my mentee (yes, it's not a word – I agree. Hmm, what is the
opposite of mentor? The online dictionary suggests “disciple” and
“follower” but both of those are a bit…cultish for my taste. So
“mentee” it shall be for the time being.) Other than getting her
name wrong at first, it seems like we'll get along fine (I don't think
I ever said it out loud but I wanted to call Sabina “Sabrina” for the
first few times we met as well. I still keep spelling
Lindsay/Lindsay/Lindsey/Lyndsey Holdsworth's name wrong. And sometimes I forget my own name and call myself “TomKat” instead. I suck
at names.)
I'm taking Kathleen for a birthday drink tomorrow afternoon so we can
get to know each other a bit more and I can impart further wisdom
(ha!).
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