Friday, October 19, 2007

Why I don't use WebCT/Blackboard much According to our campus tech support folks, this error message means, "The professor's notes on  this page included a semicolon somewhere that the new version of our 'course management system' software didn't like." An extra-charming feature: My original page (instructions for an online discussion of student projects) looked fine to me and worked perfectly for a week... Then it was completely inaccessible to students, who only got the message above. Note the "Build," "Teach" and "Student View" tabs. Only the student one -- the only one available to students -- generated this useless message; my "Teach" page looked fine. Nothing in that message suggests that the student should contact the professor, or tech support. And if any students did contact tech support, no one there contacted me. Of course "logging out of the system, then logging back in" would have no effect whatsoever, adding to the student users' frustrations with the system -- and their professor. Luckily, one student did alert me to the problem -- out of a dozen who said they'd been unable to use the system. I notified the tech support folks, one of whom deleted the errant semicolon so that students could once again get into the "discussion forum" part of the course's Blackboard/WebCT website. The "telephone support" exchange only cost me my lunch break during my 12-hour Thursday workday. Some students think their professors should trust this system with their grading, too... but I'm taking it one step at a time... and just made an appointment with an eye doctor to help me get through the next batch of non-computer-assisted grading.   4:23:40 PM    comment [] Catching up with UK Online Journalism One item leads to another... In this case, Paul Bradshaw's brief photoblog entry defining Citizen Journalism in a series of photos of a whiteboard reminded me that I haven't been visiting his blog lately. Here's what I've missed: (Media and society students may focus on the first one; intro-students may skip to the end) Citizen journalism: some conclusions from the European Bloggers Unconference A model for the 21st century newsroom: pt1 - the news diamond A model for the 21st century newsroom pt2: Distributed Journalism How to be a journalism student Guess which one of these has been crossed off the list?  Read the news.  Forget you have an opinion.  Know the difference between news and features.  Make contacts.  Get a life.  Don[base ']t sit around waiting for an email reply Learn how to spell. Be open to new experiences.  Read books. Know what the rules are so you can break them. Know what you want to get out of this - and chase it. See the details... There have been some changes, cross-outs and editing, so there[base ']s a danger you might skip past a line that says, [base "]Don[base ']t take lists like this lying down, and question everything you read and hear.[per thou] Good advice. 4:02:06 PM    comment []

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