Subtitle: “or, why I’ve had no time to write”.
The good: the week-long orientation session for incoming distance students, beginning their degree in library & information studies. I was the chief organizer, but this event was pulled off with a cast of thousands, er, uh, dozens at least, including the 29 students themselves. This was the first iteration of what will become an annual event, and some things worked better than others. We kept telling the students that they were our eldest children, a.k.a. experiments. Still, as I said on the last morning, even though things were not perfect, the good far outweighed the bad, overall, for the week. In the past, the distance students came for one day, then we met for class on TV for two semesters. Spending a whole week together was a far better way for us all to bond – they got to be with the entire class, rather than divided into 3 groups at the sites where the video conference was delivered, and I got to see their faces in living color, instead of blurry ovals on the screen.
And then as a kind of nice little coda to the symphony, as I was biking home after the last morning’s events, I met up with one of the students. She – understandably – hadn’t wanted to pay for parking on campus, so she left her car at a relative’s (I think it was a brother & sister in-law) and they gave her a bike and helmet. She was trying to figure out how to bike to their place to collect her car, and Google maps gave her a combo of bike path and city streets. I was able to give her better bike-path-following directions, and we biked partway together, and hugged on parting. She’s 2nd from the right in the upper picture, turned to the right and laughing in the second, and now I am sure, safely back in Minneapolis.
New students, fall 2010
Bootcamp set up polaroid - but the iPhone Polaroids are slower than regular digital pictures, so the set up function is thwarted.
The bad: the extremely disagreeable 14-year-old foster daughter, who’s been living with me since March. We are at the point now where I can’t say anything to this kid without getting an argument. Not fun at all.
Construction Detours
The ugly: the construction around my building and all over campus. This is the banner from the UW Physical Plant office construction page, but the project outside my building must be at least in part city of Madison streets, because it’s not even listed. I think the tipoff is that under the Park & Langdon intersection job, the city says UW will be installing underground utilities – and we in fact had no water in my building almost all day Wednesday of orientation …. I’ll add some more pictures, soon. I missed the money shot, Friday – a group of the new distance students, leaving after the close of the orientation, making their way on the narrow pedestrian path between the major excavations, fences, and dinosaur-size big diggers.
posted from my iPhone – at least partly.
