Hitting Bumps at Box.net

Curve flattening? Yes. Still bumps in the road? Of course.

As with most everything involving technology, it’s not the writing or the posting or the responding that’s causing the trouble, it’s the new little gewgaws and gadgets that make things go wrong. As I decided to pursue this online teaching thing, I figured, you know, I can do this. I can write. I can respond to posts and e-mails. If anything goes wrong, it’s going to be tied to technology.

Indeed it has. First of all, we’ve got an assignment, a simple one: Create an instructor profile using a template provided at box.net. Box.net is evidently a little cloud computing service for documents. Nice, right? Except I can’t edit my template. No way, no how. I’ve asked for help, of course.

Second of all, send a welcome e-mail, using the “everybody” option in our e-mailer. Fine and good, except I don’t have the “everybody” option. I’ve asked for help, of course.

This is all good. I’m sure part of the orientation process is meant to identify problem children (like me) who are hitting road blocks with the technology before they’re actually trying in frustration to interact with students. Hopefully these bumps will be flattened out here in the next few days. I’m optimistic. Or psychotic. Which are two very similar states of mind.