Head Tale

Spending the
afternoon at the Grad Club yesterday with a bunch of first-term
students got me thinking about what my first week here was like, what
my
first semester was like and ways that both could've been better. 

1. Have a “Destressor” at the end of the first week of classes
This way, each semester's new students can get to know people in other
terms immediately.  (The lack of connection between different
terms was a major issue for a lot of people in my cohort.)  A
first-week Destressor would also nicely bookend with the one Student
Council holds at the end of semester.  Student Council does have a
pizza party for new students early in term but this only introduces
new students to members of student council, who, although they are all
nice people, don't represent even 10% of the students in the
department.  It also is a bit of a contrived situation (or it was
last semester) with the Student Council lined up in front of the room
but not really interacting with the first-termers and instead, although
I'm sure this wasn't their intention, it was like a line was
symbolically drawn right off the bat. 

2. Have a students-only message board
This would mean that information can be exchanged easily and
past topics of conversation are accessible to all.  I know the
Student Council is working to set-up a Sharepoint site but
unfortunately, it will be under the umbrella of the Department and
housed on their intranet site therefore making it inaccessible to
incoming students (until they get their user name and password) and
graduating students six months after they leave the program.  To
my mind, a much better solution would be a more public forum (although still limited to potential students or alumni) where
anyone interested in the program can join and find out about the
current events, issues and people who are here.

3. Have a Repository For Student Writing
A few of us are working to start a journal for student writing but we
want it to have a focus on the “best of the best” student
writing.  But there's also a lot of work being done just below
this level that would be of benefit for others to see.  It seems
like a
shame that once an assignment is graded and handed back, these papers
go in a
drawer having been seen by only two sets of eyes – the student's and
the professor's. 

4. Run Relevant Student Programs
A lot of the things I've done or
been involved in – the Lunch Bucket Speaker Series, the Freedom to Read
Event, the Student Journal, Quinn's Movie Series, etc. –
are the types of things I expected the Student Council to be doing when
I got here.  Not to be too disparaing but things like bake sales, candy-grams and semi-formals seem
more like the work of a high school student council then the work that
should be done by the student council in a Graduate Program. 

5. Make Better Use of Technology
That was basically my entire last post
so I won't rehash but it covers everything from the types of technology
we have (or don't have) access to to having all lecture notes online to
teaching students about cutting-edge technology in their first term and
not letting them avoid it by not taking technology courses after
505. 

6. Release Class Lists Two Semesters In Advance
Okay, that last suggestion was pretty basic so here's an extra one.  As far as I know, the Department knows what courses they're tentatively offering up to a year in advance.  So why do they only release the courses for the upcoming semester and at that, only late in term?  For myself, it would've been very helpful to know what was being offered in Fall 2006 as I was selected my Summer 2006 courses as I could've been a lot more strategic in which courses I picked.  I know the Department is worried that students will get their hopes set on a class than it will be cancelled or whatever but isn't that what the words “tentative course list” mean? 
. 
To be fair, here are five things that are really good about this program:
1. The Peer Mentorship program
was awesome for me (although this really
depends – some people had horrible or literally no experiences out of
it.  Trying to match people based on background, area of interest
or even geographic location rather than random assignment would improve
things)
2. The Professional Mentorship program is also very useful.
3. Someone told me that Western offers a lot more electives than most
other LIS programs.  I haven't done the comparison so don't know
for sure but if true, that's very helpful.  (Maybe I'll do an
independent study next semester comparing different aspects of the
various LIS programs across Canada.  I think that would be really
interesting!)
4. Some people don't like the fact that FIMS has three intakes of
students per year (again, does anywhere else do this or are they all
September starts?) but I really like how it keeps things moving and
fresh.
5. Although I'm not planning to take advantage of it myself, the Co-op program
can be really useful, especially for anyone who doesn't have previous
library experience.

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!).