Poet Ponders the Digital

Earlier this semester, there was a "glitch" with the Blackboard shell for my writing course. I had spent hours and hours uploading content, organizing the shell, and trying to perfect the course. And then it was gone. The Blackboard team eventually restored most, but not all, of the content. It was a tough reminder that online systems are, like all computing systems, imperfect. Systems crash. Databases get corrupted. Things go wrong and you need a contingency plan. The Blackboard bungle left my students frustrated and has cost me more than few hours. While I had copies of all materials, they were scattered about my hard drive. I didn't want to duplicate files, which I thought would waste space. I sometimes used "links" (aliases) to original files, as a compromise. On my computer, which is backed up to three external drives and mirrored to another computer, I now have a directory system that aligns with my Blackboard shell. There are folders for each w...

One of the questions facing colleges and universities is "Can Anything Be Taught Online?" The simple answer is, no. But some of almost every topic can be taught online. I ask the question, "How Much of Topic X Can Be Online?" When an institution wants to take a topic online, it should ask the following: How much of the course content will work online, in the time allotted?  How will that content be delivered?  How will knowledge and skills be evaluated? What technologies will be required? Do potential students have access to the needed technology? While a school cannot have a veterinary surgery practicum online, they can provide simulations and much of the background material leading up to the physical practicum. Someday in my lifetime I imagine "robot-assisted" surgeries will be common. (They exist now, but are limited to a few procedures and there are physicians present.) Still, I'd want a surgeon to have performed "real" surger...

I spent most of today trying to get an online course ready to launch this weekend. I've never been a fan of Blackboard and the last 48 hours or so have been a reminder as to why. There are also some tool-related issues that are not purely "technical" (more on that later), but are leading to frustration. Uploading files into Blackboard, as with most online systems, is straightforward enough. But when you have dozens or even hundreds of files to import it can be a miserable experience. It is not all Blackboard issues, either, but these have been issues that didn't creep up in my life until this struggle. Issues of the last two days include: 1) Safari doesn't support the latest Adobe Acrobat plug-in. Neither did FireFox, Camino, or Chrome until I updated Chrome to the latest "beta" version. Safari does display PDFs with a built-in viewer, but PDFs within frames still require a plug-in to function. So, while I've been working with PDFs on dozens of...