Yesterday was the first meeting of the new class I'm TAing. It's an HCI course for grad students in the E-Commerce program. I have dubbed the course "20-7xx Why You Should Hire My Greek Ass".

One of the quirks of this program is that the students are issued laptops. So I'm sitting at the back of this classroom, filled to capacity, with 30-odd grad students typing away on their laptops. I can barely hear the professor over the typing noise, and everyone in the row in front of me has Yahoo Messenger open. I wasn't sure, but I could have sworn that they were talking to each other.

These people all have a class during my office hours (which will probably be moving half an hour earlier, for those of you keeping track), so I'm going to have to set up another office hour for this class. I expect this one to be slightly more well-attended. The students in this class seem to be mostly management types, and also web designers, both groups which are still somewhat hostile to HCI. (The web people because we tell them what they're doing wrong, and the management because we cost them money. Of course, we end up saving them lots of money, but they don't know that yet - that's what this class is for.)