Day 3: Starting Assumptions, Week 1

Okay, I am less frazzled this evening (first day of school is always so crazy!), and it looks like Janux is less frazzled, too - I was able to log on with no problem this time.

I will confess that I do not understand the Dashboard - there is obviously some weird stuff going on that is buggy as you can see in this screenshot, and I don't understand the order of things here at all; the starting assumptions discussion is here on the top, very prominent, but the video does not match (it's an orientation video I think); then Topic 2 is above Topic 1, and the assignment I need to do - starting assumptions - is kind of  in the middle of everything. So, I would expect the Dashboard to be the place to tell me what I need to do now... but it's not. I will try Lessons instead!

Okay, Lessons is organized in a way I understand. There is the Orientation on top - but that's a video I've already seen (it was released a while ago - I actually saw it on the OU website homepage when it was featured there), and I do know about academic integrity already (we're in trouble if I don't, ha ha). So, given my limited time, I'm going to plunge into Starting Assumptions which I think has a video for me to watch... let me click and see!

YES. Excellent... I see the video. But, not excellent, it looks like I cannot share this video, and I cannot use it with my video viewing tool of choice, VideoNot.es. ARGH! The way I like to watch educational videos is with the amazing VideoNot.es so that I can take notes that are keyed to the timestamp of the video. No such luck. Open videos benefit everybody... as do transcripts. Especially in the absence of a note-taking took like VideoNot.es, a transcript would really help for note-taking too. Coursera has transcripts (plain text) for videos... I sure would like to see that here too, but I did not see a transcript for this video.

But the video was a pleasure to listen to (Kerry is fabulous, as always), and here are my thoughts, which I will also go post in Janux:

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(Since this software troubleshooting stuff is so distracting, I've moved the actual assignment to a new post - Week 1 Starting Assumptions - and created a Label to keep the assignments separate: Assignments.)

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I'm going to go post this now and I look forward to commenting on some other people's post. I actually cannot find the "assignments" area with the "Declaration" ... but that helps me decide what I had already decided more or less, which was not to do any of the quizzes or grades or anything like that. I'm here for the pleasure of the learning; that is plenty for me. :-)

Update:

I was going to post my starting assumptions, but here is what happened:

That is in Safari. Let me go try in Chrome. ...

Update. Okay, I was able to post the reply in Chrome, but I the replies are all screwy somehow. I click reply, and there's no window. One time I did get it to bring up a window, so I typed a reply, but I cannot see if it went through. So, I went back to Safari; still getting the error message there, so I am going to try Firefox. That's the last browser I've got, so if that does not work I will call it a night. The interface is pretty terrible for discussion... I thought Coursera was terrible, but at least it was pretty simple. This is just hard to use, and for no good reason that I can figure out. I wish everything would just stay still! I think the reply window is there but it keeps scrolling out of view before I can type anything.

Update. Okay, I managed to leave my second comment in Firefox, which I guess was the best of the three, but the whole experience was maddening. There's some weird kind of delay as I type, and the space is really off-putting to browse around in. I'm used to all kinds of online environments, and I'm online all day interacting with people... but this space is really not working for me. If I were not committed to the course, I would give it up. I'd very much like to interact with the people and get to know them, but I'm not confident that this is going to happen, not with an interface that is so off-putting. Normally I would be browsing around in there, reading more, leaving lots of comments for different people - but I left two comments for people who had no comments at all on their posts (I hope everybody gets at least one comment), and that's it.

Maybe I'll try on my iPad or Chromebook later to see if it is more congenial on something other than a Mac...

Update. On the iPad I cannot get it to load at all; I just get the little green man doing his dance as it says "Loading..." - but it never finishes loading. That's Safari on the iPad.  Let me try Chromebook as one last attempt to find the hardware that will really work here...

Update. Chromebook: It also will not load on the Chromebook. I don't get the little green man; I just get "Waiting for janux.ou.edu" in the status bar. Waiting. Wating. Waiting. So maybe they are still having load problems and that is also why I was getting such a bad lag and terrible responsiveness when I actually was able to get to the discussion.

I will hope for better tomorrow... but if I were a casual visitor here, not committed to the course, I would not be coming back. Too many other places online to see, too much other stuff to do without all this frustration.