Timeline Tyranny

the ticker, the playhead, the clock that shows you where you are and when it will end. That line at the bottom of every video, always the same length, with beginning and end, between which stretches the story, preferrable less than 10 minutes.

What if we did not know how long a piece lasted? Could we stand it, not knowing, being able to anticipate the finish, when we can go on with the other thousand things we think about doing?

Heard of These Social Networks?

 I found these while hunting down embedded lore on Lasagna and chips. 
Interestingly, Ning seems to have dominated the homemade social net set, and it's exciting to see some new blood and hopefully moving toward something evermore relevant.

groupsite  

socialgo

Grou.ps

Ruth uses Meebo and would love to train anyone to use it, too, btw :-* and in this same blog post is a plug for this chat tool.

Streamlining

They streamlined the "turn on my video" button right out of the last version of Skype. They streamlined the "File" menu out of Microsoft Office. Things are much slicker and less usable all the time.

Tech Stoppers

Googling the above title returned interesting but unintended links like:
Adding a few more keywords got me no closer; finally I entered "technology setbacks user willingness computers blogs online education" and the fish started biting. Things like Wesley Fryer's Moving at the Speed of Creativity blog was really what I was looking for. Technology "stoppers" are failures that cause us to quit trying to get the damn thing to work.

We all have a breaking point, a level of tolerance, a 'click ceiling' above which we just say "enough! I have things to do and I didn't become an english teacher to learn how to program C++!" If you are taking an online course in educational technology, your tolerance is higher or you have committed yourself to tolerating it, so you're different than my friend, the english teacher.

I keep nudging her to blog, "it's writing, after all, and it increases your cool factor." She says she will, but just using Blackboard is difficult enough. When she tried to get the YC Plagiarism Tutorial into Blackboard, it worked the first time, then failed, and that was it. Over. Done deal. Stopper. Was it the machine or the human interface that failed? There's always some collusion, but does it matter? She hit her click ceiling and it was over. What's your level of tech tolerance, and how will you shape your's and your student's use of technology to stretch it?

Tech Fatigue Workshop Recording

A recording of the 1 hour session from last May's Yavapai College Summer Institute.
Play session>