The Wikiness

I’d be OK with the message that came on the first week of classes:

Bottom line: students of the Educational Technology masters program (hybrid) are getting a valuable end-user educational experience in system failure.

How do I feel as a learner when my Blackboard goes down?

• frustrated–as I mentioned in my last post (am beginning to perceive pattern), during the past week or more several occasions arose wherein I might have started my course work– digging into whatever reading and background materials the professor had assigned. Instead nothing was accessible over the web. Instead I was forced to do something less academic with my energy, like watching high-brow cinema, avoiding writing blog-posts, and grading more papers.
• alienated–this Blackboard fail kills whatever nascent community my cohort might be capable of achieving, one quarter of the way into their degree. If I were the graduate program director at CUC, I would get some social networking in place, since I think team-learning via these digital networks is going to be a valuable skill in the knowledge economy. And we’re all teachers. None of us, I’m pretty sure, is doing the wiki-based small team problem solving our students are getting.
• angry–that someone at some educational software 2.0 office somehwhere did not foresee whatever issue made the outage. Rather the same way I feel about the Christmas near-bombing; we’re paying enough for this, damn it!

How do I feel now that I have vented my emotions? Better, thanks. To my legions of readers, that’s today’s tip: identify and express your emotions. It’s psychological hygiene.