I’m sitting in my first class as a Masters of Information Science student at UNC Chapel Hill. It’s INLS 582-001: Systems Analysis. My professor is Stephanie Haas. The class website is http://ils.unc.edu/~stephani/safa07/home.html
I’ll update this post later with thoughts on the class.
Quick impressions:
- Dr. Haas doesn’t want me to blog class slides or other class materials since she is not the sole IP owner and is collaborating on a textbook that will include some of the content. Sad but understandable.
- This class is going to be awesome.
- This is on the syllabus: “Pilone, D. & Pitman, N. (2005). UML 2.0 in a Nutshell. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc. Available on the web (through UNC’s license) at safari.oreilly.com, or you may purchase it.” Looks like I’ll be able to vastly improve my flowchart by the end of the semester.
More later…
15:26
Class has ended. I just had a really encouraging conversation with Dr. Haas and one of the other students. The other student was interested in dia, which I brought up as an Open Source alternative to Visio. Dr. Haas was talking to me about this problem:
The above is a screenshot showing that the slides for the class are in the new MSOffice 2007 “.pptx” format, which OO.o users like myself won’t be happy with. Dr. Haas agreed to look into falling back to regular .ppt for future slides. That makes me very happy. 
Perhaps another update tonight…
17:57
Two surprises from amazon.com and Student Stores. The first surprise was that the Amazon price for the main textbook ($50.87) was less than the used price for the exact same paperback at Student Stores (approx. $52 used, over $70 for new). The second surprise came after I placed my order with Amazon:
Above is a screenshot from the splash page after checkout at amazon.com. Amazon is offering to let you view and take notes on your book online (from your browser) for a price and for some titles. This is awesome. If the price point were $5 and not $13 for this book I might bite.
I think that’ll be all for this post. This class looks interesting enough that I’ll likely be posting more about it. Back to work I go….
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