bugsii

This morning I felt like I should move my legs a bit and get the circulation going, so I decided to walk to work.  This adds 15 minutes to my “commute,” but it was such a nice morning that it was worth it.  I used my iPhone app, Stitcher, and listened to NPR news the whole way.  It almost felt like my old car ride to work (minus the car of course).  

This afternoon at work we had some training on using Word 2007 (please see the title of this post).  It’s not that the training was particularly terrible, it’s just the style of training for all of these workshops is so old school that I start to nod off and then get annoyed.  First of all, Word 2007 is not that crazy different from Word 2003, not enough to necessitate a 1.5 hour training on the topic.  It does look pretty different compared to other upgrades, but the functions are all the same.  I have used it a few times before, very briefly, but I really just needed to play around with it a little bit to get comfortable.  But no, we were required to attend this 1.5 hour training or else our computers would not get the upgrade.  So, first we have to watch some videos on the history of the various Word upgrades (95, 98, 2000 (bombed), 2003, and 2007).  I was wishing I had some toothpicks to prop my eyelids open.  Then, we had to practice with some “exercises” that included making bullets and inserting a picture.  Wow.  When we got to the more advanced stuff, we inserted a comment and then deleted it.  We did this all step by step too.  

I know why “they” do this.  They think that they will be able to circumvent a bunch of dumb questions during the transition, but I guarantee that they will still get the exact same amount of dumb questions, so I have a solution.  Just upgrade the computers, let us play and we’ll ask how to insert a picture if that poses a problem for us.  Also, maybe it would be better to teach some general computer skills, like how to search google or forums to find answers to dumb questions or how to be comfortable playing around with something you don’t know 100%.  That’s how you learn.  Use your resources and explore.  Learning how to do something on the computer step by step is not really how the computer works.  There are lots of ways to do everything, so just play, for Dan’s dad’s sake (his name is Pete).  :)

Today was another loooong day, but I do feel somewhat caught up and prepared for the weekend.  The vast majority of my work is done for next week, so once I head down to Cincy tomorrow, I can really enjoy it (sure, I’ll be reading a bit here and there, but it will be early in the morning and in secret!).  Tomorrow, while Dan is finishing up at work, I am attending the Educational Learning Technology Unconference. I’d never heard of an “unconference” before, but it sounds like a really neat idea.  It’s a four hour mini conference with four sessions periods during which there are multiple sessions going on.  The sessions are flexible, so you can come and go as you please.  The sessions are also driven by whatever the participants want to talk about.  So, I’m really interested in blogging and can’t wait to have some good discussions on it… and if it’s not going well, I just up and leave and head to another session.  The group that is putting this on developed a website where all the participants have put up some information about their backgrounds and interests where they have been doing some pre-talking about things that may come up at the conference.  The conference also has it’s own twitter feed that will have back channel conversations going on about the conference and a wiki where all participants can take notes about sessions and give feedback.  Neato!  In the future, I hope I can have an unconference about something.  I also want to have an unschool and an unjob.  This will be very unexciting… wait, no…