Angus Blair

Americans are kinda dumb and fairly formulaic - Darl Kolb

Last Thursday I had my first lecture of the semester, a 7 hour class in a monolith of a paper designed to educate us on change and innovation in organisations with a re-occuring theme of connectivity. As my only paper of the semester aside from my dissertation it looks to offer no relief on my workload, however the 30 points attributable to the course seems incentive enough.   The paper is lectured by Darl Kolb and Deb Shepherd who with the different styles each bring there own kind of enthusiasm to class. Things are casual kept conversational which is nice great and pretty consistent with my postgrad experience thus far, the lecturers are keen to dish out words of wisdom not typical of traditional roles.

Everyone should wag at least one day per year - Deb Shepherd

The real highlight is however in the content and the way in which the course is assessed. Though there is a lot of team assessments which i normally despise, we are going attempting to be connectivity consultants on various projects which should be rewarding and challenging. In addition there's a focus on reflexivity on our own connectivity which present great opportunities to utilise more contemporary means of communication which I definitely enjoy. In addition to that great work we're also being asked to utilise "new media" in order to reflect on on our learning experiences and class themes. So consider this my first post of reflection, guess I better do some of that. After our first class (like everything else in postgrad) I now know that I don't know bugger all about innovation and change, academics love ambiguity it would seem. In social reflection however the class is great, one person showed up with only three hours sleep with alcohol on his breath, a quick trip to shadows at lunch had him going again and the meal of champions you see pictured can get you through any lecture. Teams for the projects should be allocated soon and I'll be content working with most people in the class. As this is meant to be a traditional use of new media I will endeavour to keep it fresh with a blogging style and ignore the fact that my lecturers may actually read it. This may mean some honesty I wouldn't normally impart in an academic environment, lets see how that works out.