Techno Stressssssssssssss....

What a night! Whatever you worry might go wrong--it did! I had my second presentation tonight on Brown, Collin, and Duguid's article, Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning (1989), and worked like a dog on the article and the presentation. Then, got everything ready to go except to load the handouts and PPT onto WebCT and took a catnap. Of course, I got up with just enough time to upload and go to class.

Unfortunately, while I napped, my Vista was quite busy downloading every frigging update known to my computer. As soon as I hit the space bar to wake it up, the darn screen froze, unfroze, froze again, unfroze, and a variety of little dialogue windows opened. After shutting them down, I tried to get onto WebCT--no deal--it would not load. I got a general error on IE. My next move was to pull up Windows Live Mail--instead I got an error saying it was not available or had been moved. Then I decided to try Firefox browser--but it too errorred out. So, I opened MSN browser and after it greeted me with a friendly "hello," it froze. Then I thought I would just restart the darn thing and try to open it in Safe Mode. Unfortunately, there were a MILLION updates that needed to load and a message that said DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER UNTIL UPDATES ARE COMPLETE. I figured it might take a couple minutes--so I got ready to go and called a taxi. 10 minutes later the demon Vista was still churning away. I waited--15 minutes, and then the whole screen went black. Well, I waited for another 5 minutes and the windows logo briefly flashed, the computer restarted and bypassed safe mode and went to black again. I gathered up the handouts I printed and headed for school.

But, no matter, thank goodness, I had printed my handouts earlier and this is a very good lesson in presentation management--backup, backup, backup with low tech materials--just in case. Other than getting to class a little late, the presentation went well. It was quite a bit different than my first presentation experience, where I used UMConnect (Adobe Connect) to present an online, live, synchronous presentation and discussion. Tonight's presentation was off-line, live, and synchronous with a face-to-face audience and a slightly rattled and appologetic me. Actually, I liked being able to see everyone's reaction and found it rather enjoyable to not have to deal with technology!

There were a few drawbacks, however, over the online presentation. There was no recording of my presentation, which did not allow for as much personal reflection for improvement as the last presentation. Although I had handouts for everyone, and darn glad of it, the verbal discussion was not recorded either. Although everyone participated in the discussion and I appreciated that very much, there is no record for either the students or myself that documented what happened in presenting the article. The only artifact we have is the PPT Presentation and the handout file, which I loaded on WebCT as soon as my computer kicked-in.

But, I survived a techno nightmare with paper backups. Let this be a lesson to me!

P.S. I have tweaked my Windows Vista once again to turn off all automatic updating--but now my Windows One care Software is swearing at me in yellow! MS might call it Mojave, but I am calling it VexationVista....