New Year, New Project

Retrospective on Education and Literature is all very well, and what we need. With this new double-digit year (2010) though, I am using the education aspect of the website to write about a project: moving a course from classroom to online. The process is not interesting to the tekkies, probably – since they have been living and talking computer talk for years, but as more and more of us classroom people are asked (expected, required) to present material not only in the classroom but also online to the classroom students, to the students whose life emergencies have kept them from attending class, and to the world, online has become a significant factor in our lives.

If I could, I would draft Julie, the über-IT, to sit by my side, or at least to be on call. Julie, with good old MN independence, would point out that I learn much more when I do it myself. Maybe I don’t want to learn more, I think rebelliously, and my self responds just as rebelliously, ‘Then whyever did you enter education.’ I am checkmated, to use a mishmash of metaphors.

Each system is different and each class requires different information: we know that already. Now, though, I need to talk with a computer to stash (shovel, throw, catapult) what was in the classroom into its logical-to-the-tekkie format. Classrooms don’t run on logic. Computers do.