Principles or Stubborness

Once again I find myself giving in and doing something that I swore that I wasn’t going to do.

Last time it was getting the Shopper’s Club card at the grocery store. In a previous place I lived I was so irritated by the card that for several months I refused to go to the supermarket and only shopped at the Chinese market and at health food stores. I never did figure out how to make bitter melon edible.

Now it is Blackboard. Blackboard is the only way to receive an updated class list; this is the only reason that I want access to it.

Today I gave in and signed up for the training session. We are not allowed to use Blackboard until we complete a mandatory training class. Even if we keep all of our course’s online content on our own webpages that we code ourselves and only want to use Blackboard to find out which students are in our classes. This is the reason I’ve resisted Blackboard for so long. I am incapable of playing along nicely with lame-ass training sessions that waste my time.

Now, however, the Office of Information Technology has finally given in to the plea, “If Blackboard is such a great way to teach online and if you are all such specialists at designing online learning environments, why can’t you teach us about it online?” And I have registered for the online training.

Allow me to quote from the description of this session:

[Since this course] is delivered completely online, we ask that only experienced computer users register for it. In order to complete the required tasks, you will be expected to: Work simultaneously in two browser windows, copy and paste text from a word processor [...], browse in your operating system [...] to find a document stored on your computer, download files from the Internet and save them to your computer.

And here I’ve been thinking I’m a total Luddite because I can’t convince tcsh to save my old commands in a history file.

So now I am waiting for them to send me my secret access code so that I can be indoctrinated educated.