Day two
Day One, yesterday was a little too busy for me to make any notes.
But I suppose I should say something about it. Well, yesterday was the first day of the new semester. I seem to have two really good groups of students for my Business Policy and Strategy class, and for Introduction to Business.
The case based format of the strategy course often comes as a surprise to students. Nevertheless, most are able to be very successful with it. It will be really interesting to see how they do with the first two cases on Thursday (Edward Marshall Bohem and New Steel). Both cases are a great introduction to both strategy and the case method and come from the Mintzberg text book The Strategy Process: Concepts, Contexts, Cases.
This is a really good text book which we have used for a number of years. Having said that we are trying out de Wit and Meyer's text Strategy: Process, Content, Context
Both of these texts present a more pluralist view than is sometimes found in some strategy texts. They also has a lot of (often conflicting) readings from a large numbers of researchers in the strategy field. The de Wit and Meyer text, in particular, sets up up opposing views of strategy and explorers the dynamics of those opposites.
In the Introduction to Business course I used an exercise called Room 703. This seemed to warm the class up and provided a really good introduction to some of the issues involved when working in-teams.
It's been a hectic day, but at last I've some time to work on my PhD thesis.
Arrgh, Doug, Christine and I have been asked to submit a portfolio to the faculty so that we can be considered for the Tertiary Teaching Excellence in teaching award. This is very nice, but it is due at 9:00 on Friday. This is rather tight, considering how busy the first week of teaching-is.
Well we have come up with a draft plan to tackle this–I just hope the committed like it. I'll mind map it out this evening, and tomorrow we can start some serious writing. (As an aside, I really like–and use–Mind Manager as a tool to produce mind-maps.)
I had an automated call from Jetstream saying I was coming up to my monthly ADSL limit of 600Mb. On checking the usage I found I was already 50Mb over … I wonder why they are never early on these things. Still at 20c a Mb I'm sure they like the extra income.