From "dummy" to "expert"

It is past time for me to be making an entry in my blog, so here it is. It is interesting how in just a very short time, I have gone from knowing nothing about blogging to teaching a class on - - - believe it or not - - - blogging. A while back, I was talking to the Director of training at our local FHC, and mentioned blogging to her. She said "oh wonderful if you know something about it, let's have you teach a class."

We discussed her suggestion for a while, and for some crazy reason, I thought it would be fun. Some of you responded to my cry for help, and with the ideas I picked up, I put together a class outline. I recently taught that that first class, and really enjoyed it. There were about 10 in the class. We looked a little bit at the history of blogging, what it is, some of the pros and cons and some of the things to be careful about. Because of some of the blocks that are on our server, we could not access a site so that everyone could create their own blog on their own class computer, but I managed a way to bypass the server on one computer and was able to project the monitor images on the screen, so everyone could see how it was done. One of the students went through the process of creating a blog, making links, inserting photos, and other similar tasks, and the others were able to observe how it was done. The feedback after the class was very positive. And since that time, I have heard from several of the students who have set up their blog.

One of the students set up his blog and then linked to another site where he has placed all of his photo albums. He was quite excited about being able to share his photos and blogging with all of his family members. Teaching the class was a good experience for me because I found it necessary to really explore blogging. I got into the "help" section, and did enough research to do what I felt was a fairly decent job of teaching. I am still learning new things. I am far from being an "expert". In fact, it has always been my opinion that to understand the word "expert" you had to break it into two parts. One part being "ex" and the other part being "spurt". When you realize that an "ex" is just a has been, and that the spurt is just a drip under pressure, it becomes more understandable why I could talk about going from dummy to expert.

It was, all things considered, a delightful experience.