Slehrner- Hey Steph, I think it's safe to bring your laptop the first week or so at least. Depending on what professor is teaching the lecture, there might or might not be notes/powerpoint presentations to download onto your computer to study later. There will be some little tutorials once in awhile that will help for things like x-rays as well. Sometimes, we just dumped our laptops in our lockers during lunch time if you don't want to watch it all the time. I don't know if that is safer during the regular year, but I heard a lot of second years saying how they were very casual with the laptops.. I guess there are so many around anyway.. and there is just some honor code amongst the students.
You could bring all the books you want.. stick them in your locker too if you don't want to haul them around during class. I would only bring books if I intended on using them to study outside of class on campus.. or if I wanted to browse through my Netter Atlas while in anatomy class. (Professors will refer to Netter pages in class and you can't see the pages as clearly when they project them on the board).
As for notebooks, well.. yeah bring them so you can take notes! Each professor has his/her own style.. so just play it safe for the first week or two and then figure out what is and isn't necessary. Remember what Arnold said about most books not being necessary in the end anyway.
I wish I could go to Vegas but unless some SAPP group goes, I'm probably not going to go by my lonesome. Most of the ISAC'ers left or are leaving tomorrow after the facilitator training. (note: not me.. heh)
*** Regarding the curriculum changes:
I talked to one of profs I previously knew before I came to Western who is on the curriculum committee and he mentioned that they wouldn't get around to implementing changes in the curriculum until at least next year or the year after that.. so we are still looking at approximately a 9-5pm schedule still. He said there were just too many things to coordinate with the diff professors.. they are working on it now, but it will come gradually. There might be slight changes that we won't notice during this year.. hopefully next year there will be more. It seems like they will be shifting a bit away from systems to a more traditional method of teaching from what I hear, but he was pretty vague when talking about that.
So that's my little update.. hopefully I will get more news in the future. Now that my fellow ISAC'ers are gone.. I love you SAPP'ers! Hehe..