ideas for the course this year

pat, jay, john and i met at tim horton's yesterday (my fave place, i'm sure you knew that already) to talk about changes for the course coming up.

we're looking at the following (with an eye to doing this in the future, but not necessarily this year, due to logistics):

• giving on-the-road lectures using a laptop attached to a couple of portable dvd players (monitors); this has the added bonus of enabling the students to watch movies on the move in down time
  
• getting gps with maps and navigational information built in
  
• getting internet access anywhere using cellular service
  
• getting better map printing power
  
• relaxing the prerequisites for the course
  
• taking the focus of the classroom part of the course even more away from the purely theoretical and more into the practical
  

i'm sure there were more, but it's late now and i'm pretty tired--i've been researching this stuff all day.

on another note, the cold spell is going to end. FINALLY. winter in winnipeg has been a pretty good one, save for 2 weeks of unrelenting cold. (and when i say "cold", i mean cooooooooold. as in, the temperature has barely been above -20°C for the entire time, with a low of -41.7 one night. that's enough for me.