Day 1, Semester 2…
Hi all.
I just finished my first real on-line class about 40 minutes ago for “Information Organization and Access”. As I imagined, I feel a lot better about the class, its workload, requirements, etc. I have my other class (“Electronic Publishing”) on Tuesday so hopefully I’ll find some mental relief there too.
The Information Organization class is the last of my two “core” classes, and while the general theme and information of the class is interesting to me, core classes always kinda grate me a little. Even in graduate school core classes, you get the people who don’t really want to be there for that particular topic and hence spend the class making wise-cracks or fail to take anything in the class seriously.
There’s this one guy, who shall remain nameless, who literally has to post a crack after every other comment. His bio (we all have them – to build “community”) is even full of wisecracks. It’s funny how I can tell just from on-line prattle that this guy wants to be our class clown. Unfortunately for all of us, he’s a really bad clown.
Because we do all our class lectures and discussion on-line, the annoying chatter and quips of Crappy the Clown and folks like him get mixed in with the real questions and comments of interested students. This is further complicated by the fact that there’s 50 people in this class. All the chat clutter makes the dialog hard to follow. I ended the class with a slight headache to accompany my relief.
My Electronic Publishing class is an “elective,” has only 12 people in it, and we all (according to our bulletin board posts) have an interest in the topic. I’m expecting slightly more focused discussion on Tuesday.
I know, I know, I sound like a fuddy-duddy, but seriously, I’m here to learn. A funny comment here and there is fine, but 12 jokes about how a philosopher’s name sounds like a “dark lord” when the lecturer is trying to explain a cataloging concept is really frickin’ annoying.