Friday, April 4, 2008

For a Change: Frustration

As I've stated here in a few previous posts, my teaching load this semester is entirely online. What this means to me, usually, is that I go to work, or go somewhere to work, and spend my time creating course content or grading students work. I have always been able to do this with little trouble, for the technology, in this case the CMS Blackboard, always works well. But, for whatever reason, I have been having nothing but trouble, on two different computers, today. When I started working on my classes at 9:00 this morning, everything was fine. I was working my shift in the writing center, and I was on the school's wireless internet service. I got quite a bit accomplished, and after an hour, I moved up to my office and continued working up there. After about fifteen minutes, the internet serviced slowed to a crawl, so I switched the to Dell desktop that the school provides for me. I was able to keep working for about an hour, and then, I started to experience Blackboard difficulties: pages wouldn't load, or if they would, my content would be erased and a nice error message would follow. Lovely. So, I contact IT here, and am informed that they have been working in Blackboard all morning with no problem. It must be me - certainly. No more than thirty minutes later, everything is back to working fine. But, now, I am back in the writing center, trying to finish up my online work, and of course, Blackboard is giving me the run-around again. The semester is nearly 3/4 of the way over, and I can't figure out why the technology is messing up now. It makes no sense, and it only slows me down ... way down. So, instead of working and being productive, I now have time, that I don't really want to use this way, to blog. Great.

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