I’m in the Eastern Iowa Airport (Cedar Rapids, IA) using the free WiFi to get caught up from this four day trip to Iowa City, IA for two days of BCR workshops and an afternoon speaking to the staff of the Iowa City Public Library about the Social Web as part of their in-service day. Today went well and everyone enjoyed it including myself. The previous two days however, if it could go wrong it did. Cases in point:
- For the blogs class, Blogger finally decided to send everyone creating a new blog to the beta version. This meant that many of my handouts didn’t match what they were looking at on the screen, didn’t match the screen I was projecting and there were new/changed features that I wasn’t prepared to discuss.
- In the RSS workshop, FeedXS finally convinced me that it’s useless for class purposes and I was pretty much forced to just tell everyone to skip it and ignore that part of the handouts.
- I taught my podcasting class for the first time and, instead of ending up with a short list of things to tweak for the next time out, I need to redo about 50% of the workshop and change the focus for the second half of the class. And, the BCR FTP server decided that it kept wanting to drop my connection so I couldn’t upload the students’ MP3 files to the server to get to work with the software I was trying to teach them.
- During the wiki class I instructed all eleven students on how to create a Wikipedia account, something I’ve done many other times. This time, six of them were able to create accounts while the other five got error messages informing them that six accounts had already been created from that IP address and no other new accounts would be allowed for 24 hours. Turns out that to the outside world all of ICPL’s computers are represented by one IP address. Great for the network architecture and for security reasons but it causes problems with Wikipedia’s security. A good portion of the class was from that point on a demo instead of hands on.
Needless to say it’s been a long week and I need a few solid nights of sleep before getting back to the office on Monday and updating the material for those classes before teaching them again in January.
