Alone again in the DL (distance learning) lab. It didnt take long for the phone to ring and someone that I had helped with podcasting in last Fridays workshop needed some general help with iTunes, Blackboard, and some other odds and ends.
So, I took myself to her office. Marjorie Gross had a nice list of problems she had encountered while tyring to set up her classes in Blackboard. It seems the new version was having some difficulty in her margins when she created an assignment. With the point values and other attributes of the assignment showing, all of her assignment was crunched over to one tall column. Unfortunately, I was not able to help her fix that problem. What I did find was little quirks such as some of the edit features that were getting hung up and not able to allow changes. Once we played a little with the code, it reset itself and allowed changes to occur.
iTunes was a different animal. For some reason, the Dell she was working on wasnt allowing iTunes to operate properly. We did check for an iTunes upgrade, which was available. Once I had that installed with the latest version of QuickTime, everything worked.
What was fun about helping Marjorie is that she (and I) enjoyed my visit. I found myself listening to stories about her kids and grandkids. She asked for some suggestions about Car Magazines for her 12 year old grandsons birthday (which I was easily able to do considering that muscle cars fall into my hobby catagory). Reflecting back to my 6040 class, I found that the Many Hats game about Instructional Designers was again accurate. You have to sometimes take on many roles other than just a designer to solve issues in instruction.