I’m Not Sure What This Might Mean, But I’m Afraid

For some reason, this week I have been having the most bizarre and vivid dreams. They wake me up – and then I lay in bed unable to get back to sleep. They aren’t really nightmares – they are just extremely odd. I don’t remember most of them when I wake up in the morning. Well, last night at about 12:35AM I woke up from a deep sleep - a bit disoriented. I had been dreaming. While I do not remember the entirety of the odd dream, I do remember a particularly wacky detail. I was telling a family member a story about one of our second cousins who had just been picked to be on a new reality tv show. This reality show was going to be a joint effort by the Discovery Health channel and the Food Network (I guarantee you won’t guess where this is headed). First, the stars would have surgery to remove some organ. The surgeries would be documented on one tv show. Once recovered, the person would then do his/her own cooking show where they would cook the organ that had been removed with some special, fancy recipe. The best recipe would win the overall prize. Hmmm. . . . . . . What could that possibly mean? I think I might be scared. Prior to this, the oddest dream that I remember was one in which my best friend and I were going to a party. I was at her house waiting for her to get ready (which took a long time). When she finally came down the stairs – several hours late, she was dressed as Hamlet. It wasn’t a costume party. Hopefully, my dreams will go back to normal now.

On an unrelated (and less odd) note, Mythbusters is doing a show about pirate myths tonight. I can’t wait! Ahoy, Matey!!!

I’m Looking Forward To This Semester

Yesterday, my ILS656-Information Architecture professor sent a general email letting us know that classes start on the 22nd of January – and giving us instructions for logging onto the class. It seems that SCSU made some changes in its policies for accessing online course material over break. From what I understand, all schools in the Connecticut State University system shared one course management for distance education programs (at one time called OnlineCSU). Each university also had an additional CMS portal for traditional and hybrid classes. I always wondered why there seemed to be so much confusion among students accessing online classes. However, I can see how students taking both traditional and online classes at the same time would get confused by having two separate systems with different usernames. I guess the CSU system decided to disband the OnlineCSU system – and now we all log into SCSU’s WebCT portal. The big difference is that we no longer log in with some 8 digit number, but use another log in (a more traditional username that is some combination of our names). It took a while to figure this out – but fortunately, I was able to figure it out with some help from fellow graduate students via the ILS listserv.

Once I finally logged onto the system successfully, I was able to poke around in the course site for ILS656-Information Architecture. The professor has already posted all sorts of material. I probably should not have been surprised. This professor has her own web site with information about the courses she teaches, projected courses with tentative schedules and syllabi. She also includes the texts for these classes. I can’t stress how wonderful it is to have this information when registering for classes. I so wish other professors would do the same. Anyway, this all makes me very excited about this class. I think it will be a wonderful learning experience -albeit a challenging one. I’m also looking forward to ILS560-College & University Libraries. I have already taken two classes with the professor teaching this class – and so far he has been my favorite professor.