Instant messaging benefits

Thursday is finally over! While I came into this week incredibly relaxed (getting 25 hours of sleep in a 48 hour period will do that, especially when combined with an incredibly relaxing location), this week has ended up being just as stressful as any other week.

As a result of this week's stress I didn't have enough time to properly set up my weekly knowledge check, and ended up messing-up a few of the settings (the primary problem was that the release date was wrong). Upon getting back to my office after lab tonight I got a friendly IM from a student who asked why the knowledge check wasn't available. After I fixed the release date, she then kindly pointed out my second error: there were too few questions being selected from the question pool. What a great example of how useful IM can be, and how helpful (and honest) students can be.

Oh, I also had another funny IM exchange today. I had a student IM me around noon asking a question about lab, which he then followed up with "It's 12:15. Shouldn't you be out to lunch?" Since I barely have time to eat lunch at my desk most days I couldn't help but laugh ...