Poet Ponders the Digital

I tend to answer questions when asked, often without pausing long enough to consider the best wording — or even if I should answer. This semester, I'm teaching a course that uses Wikis to explore collaboration. The students are struggling with the Wiki format and some of the concepts. You'd be wrong if you thought users of Wikipedia understood how the system functions. I mentioned that installing and maintaining any content management system (CMS) was a good skill to have. A student then asked about job skills currently in demand. He was told by someone that some specific tools were in demand, while others were not. The tools and skills he was told are valuable are absolutely, positively not highly-valued based on a simple search of tech-focused job sites. And, of course, I said so. Sorry, but Visual Basic isn't going to land you at the top of the field. (There are still companies using VB for database applications, but C# is a better choice in my view.) And while ...

Monday night, I spent an hour reviewing basic Word skills with my students. One student asked why she needed to learn the "right" way to use Word, when nobody cared if you used spaces instead of tabs, hit return instead of inserting page breaks, and manually numbered your pages. I was stunned, to say the least, that anyone — especially a child of the digital age — could suggest software skills aren't important. Learning to use any application effectively eventually saves time and improves your work. If you learn how to use Word moderately well, you save minutes a day, and those minutes become hours over a month. Learning any application's features opens up new possibilities. I tell my students that letting Word automate some tasks frees more time to focus on the words instead of the formatting. To me, this is a self-evident observation: I would rather spend time writing rather than formatting. And then, on Wednesday, I received an official departmental syllabus ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley November 5, 2012 Deadline December 2012 Issue You Need Backups: The Benefits of Off-Site Storage Hurricane Sandy reminds us that in a matter of minutes everything in a building can be destroyed. Though we can predict some disasters, others come quickly and without warning. My wife and I have lived in places with earthquakes, tornadoes, floods and blizzards. Those are only some of the natural disasters that can upend lives. And then, there are the unfortunate events beyond nature. When things do go so horribly wrong, they take possessions and memories. Sometimes, the losses include computer hardware and storage media. In a serious disaster, the best place for personal and business data is somewhere far, far away from the event. Yet, most of us don’t have off-site backups of important data. It is time to adopt an off-site backup strategy. Because all storage media fail, my wife and I do all we can to maintain backups of important data. I have th...