Thursday, January 1, 2009

Gearing up for another semester

Another semester beckons, and is fast approaching! If I'm able to stick to my schedule, this is the next-to-the-last-one for me. To complete my philosophy minor, I'll be taking Will Cowling's PHI 425 History of Modern Philosophy. I just took PHI 301 Critical Thinking under Will in the fall, which served double duty as an LIS elective and a required philosophy minor course. Will supervises his classes from his home in Oregon. As an online instructor, it's not necessary that he be on the UIS campus anymore than the rest of us. When we speak of UIS's Global Campus, it is truly that - we even had a student in 301 living in Sweden, a 9-hour time difference between Scandinavia and the American west coast!

Under Will's direction, the Critical Thinking class took on a new dimension this fall. We applied the critical thinking skills we were learning to the recent presidential election debates through posts on our discussion board. It was surprising the extent to which we picked out the hyperbole and fallacies of the campaigns' rhetoric even after only a few weeks into the course.

I'm also going to be following up on CSC 321 Intermediate Web Design with CSC 319 Computer Programming. The class project for 321 involved creating a website. This was an opportunity to get going on a site I have been wanting to do for quite some time - a website for my late father's WWII artillery battalion. Although there was only time in the class to get the site set up in its preliminary stages, over the holidays I've gotten it uploaded onto its own webserver (http://203fabn.bravehost.com) instead of the UIS servers. It's now in its final phase ready to add content, scanning in photos and documents.