w00t! The Lion Roars!

Well, despite my recent grousing, the new iMac just paid for itself. Matter of fact, it may have paid for itself in spades.

The colleges where I freelance…uhm, work as an adjunct “employee” use a course management program called Blackboard. This widely loathed suite of educational software worked pretty well in its callow youth, but now that it’s reached middle age it is decidedly top-heavy. And it’s renowned among faculty and students alike for its time-consuming, circular, and chronically frustrating quirks.

Among its many curiosities, it won’t let you upload a lecture-length lecture. Video communications with students, we’re told, need to be limited to three or four minutes.

That’s practical: you, too, can create 10 or 15 separate videos to upload a 40-minute lecture. What else do you have to do with your time, eh?

Found a workaround. Discovered it would work only in one semester’s shell, so that each lecture had to be redone or, equally time-consuming, manually moved every freaking semester.

What else to I have to do with my time, eh?

Rebuilt my lectures as PowerPoints with audio. Blackboard wouldn’t upload them. Audio took up too much space.

Rebuilt the PowerPoints as silent presentations, typing transcripts of spoken passages. What else do I have to do with my time, eh?

Blackboard wouldn’t upload them, either.

Broke the PowerPoints into tiny little pieces and deleted as many images as possible. What else do I have to do with my time, eh?

Blackboard wouldn’t upload ANY PowerPoint files. Period. It won’t upload PowerPoint presentations.

Converted all the PowerPoints into PDFs. Not as time-consuming as some of the other antics, but still…

So this all took the wind out of my sails, when it came to creating and presenting the online magazine writing course that’s supposed to be such a little showpiece.

I tried creating a video and posting it to YouTube, but with the antique iMac and the aged software, one had to jump through hoop after complicated hoop after ever-more complicated hoop to get a video file online. And you know what? I do have better things to do with my time!

Months pass. Eventually I get around to purchasing the present brand-new iMac, and the Apple Geniuses clone the cute little MacBook Pro onto the new spectacular contraption.

This morning while I’m playing with it, I notice an old video file on the desktop, where I’d saved it to the MacBook during the failed attempt to post it to YouTube. It opened in QuickTime, and lo! QuickTime now has all sorts of interesting things you can do with a file.

Among these are the options to save the file in a Web-compatible format and to post it to YouTube, Vimeo, or several other platforms.

Like, just one click and it will go up on YouTube?

Really?

Yesh. Really.

Couldn’t believe it!! As we scribble, we’re uploading my second attempt at stardom, a discussion of how writers use a magazine’s table of contents to gather crucial marketing information. The first one, on the uses of a masthead, is already up on YouTube and embedded in the course Website!

Well. This not only will supercharge my online course, it will give me a very nice example to wave around during the upcoming interview for a full-time job. It will show that I know how to use the Internet for pedagogical purposes. With a vengeance.

Mwa ha ha!

I still believe I’ve got a snowball’s chance in a crematorium of getting hired. I mean really: would you hire someone into a plum job if that someone was already collecting Social Security? No. Of course not.

Still. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Or, to coin yet another phrase, anything’s possible. I guess.

If a miracle happens and I get this job, and I start at about what I was earning at GDU…well. Let’s see…I paid $2,200 for the computer. Should the college hire me, under the influence of the spectacular videos I just posted for its students, that computer will have paid for itself 22.3 times over.

🙂