The Catire goes online...

Over the summer the staff of the Cadre have been work- ing with the members of the BEAT program, to develop a rich online presence for the Cadre. BEAT is a new initia- tive here at UPEI which gives students from various backgrounds an opportunity to work together on useful projects, typically web appli- cation development projects, for academic credit. :

One of BEAT's current proj- ects is Weblogs@upei a service which will be offering content management tools, like weblogs, to anyone with a valid and functioning UPE|I email address. There is no limit to the ways in which we might use these tools to enhance communication and creativity on campus. Just one example is the way in which this site uses them to publish our content online.

Over the coming weeks and months you will see The

Cadre Online evolve. The layout, look, and feel will improve. In addition to pub- lishing our regular print con- tent here eventually we will present indexed and aggre- gated views to your weblog content, and the online dis- cussion they generate. We will be indexing and aggre- gating outside news sources as well and exploring ways of grouping the information so that you can easily find what you're looking for and engage in two-way convesa- tion easier.

These tools allow us to become a richer, more rele- vant and more timely infor- mation source. They'll allow more of you to contribute to both the print and online ver- sions of the Cadre. And

they'll allow us to reach a lot

more people. Thank you for your patience as we experi- ment.....and stay tuned to http://cadre.upei.cal

LC

UPEI Cadre September 28, 2004 page 9

Both Paratlise and Purgatory

So they tell us thisi/~ is "a great small} university". For the

never take. Admittedly, one of my favourite

jithings about UPEI is

most part, I can believe them based on my personal experi- ences during my two full years at UPEI, though for a time I wasn't completely sure. Last spring to be precise. Maybe it was the Prince Edward Island winter. Maybe it was the fact that I was experienc- ing a large bout of wanderlust. Maybe I was feeling that there wasn't enough social variety on the island, and that our small province was simply too conser- vative. Or maybe it was just me. Whatever the reason, despite my connections with UPEI profes- sors, students and friends, I applied to and was accepted by both King's College and Dalhousie University with the full intent of taking my half-fin- ished degree to the much bigger city of Halifax.

I spent a week at Dal dur- ing the spring break, speaking with profs and sitting in on cours- es to get a taste of how their organization was different from UPEI’s. Though there's a lot of exaggeration about, there are a number of larger class sizes at Dal (though when you reach fourth-level, at least in the arts, the sizes are about the same as UPEI from what I've experi- enced). What bothered me most, however, was the lack of freedom about the campus and that one could indeed feel like a nameless student. One true advantage to UPEI is the wonderful fact that not only do the profs in my cho- sen subjects know me personally, I‘m on a first name basis with a number of profs from subjects I've never studied and classes I'll

that I can sit in a lounge and read (or sleep. : . err... yeah. . .) long into the evening, whereas at Dal it seemed most of the campus was locked up via security system by 5 PM.

Unfortunately, despite its excellent. academic qualities, UPE]I is plagued by being located on the outside of Charlottetown. The university web site boasts that the campus is "minutes from sandy beaches and the downtown core of the capital city of Charlottetown". This isn't helpful when its - 40 outside and there's no public transportation any- where except pricey taxies. Beaches are out 3/4 of the year anyway, so why harp about them? Another annoying feature of the town is the fact that most things downtown close around 5 PM, and even the bloody grocery stores call it a night at 10 PM. This leaves late evening food options for students consisting of brand-name grease or brand- name subs with supposedly six- grams of fat or less, both of which take a huge chunk out of limited funds.

Another problem is that both the city and an extent the campus don't really come off as a student-centred community for varied entertainment. In my time at UPEI, some first-year students and others from away have com- plained to me that there's nothing much else to do on the weekend except get shit-faced in the resi- dences. The Student Centre has

been around for three years now and, like the physical building