Digital Dodginess

 Again, it's been some time since I ran my fingers at the frenetic pace over the keyboard. That is because I've spent nearly every spare hour this week working on a university assessment that was due tonight. Don't worry, I got it submitted, but not without trials, tribulations, and multitudinous drama that saw me seriously worrying for my sanity - yeah, yeah, I know: that horse has fled the stable and left behind a great steaming pile of horse apples -but this past week was really draining. I thought I was going completely around the twist, and furthermore, was taking along my family as unwilling hostages.

The assessment involved presenting two summations: one on cyberbullying and the other on any topic from a list relating to this crazy Internet world. In theory, this is all good because I enjoyed learning about the topics and was confident I understood the underlying issues, as well as having some ideas about how those issues could be resolved. But this was the problem: the summations had to be presented multimodally on a website to be created by me. The subject I'm studying relates to the digital world, and whist I have blogged for many, many years, there is a large pothole in my path to finalising this subject, and that pothole is this: the only people less digitally fluent than I am are the Amish. 

I will not go into too much detail at the moment, but the past week saw me:

1. Opening and closing accounts with presentation platforms

2. Grappling with a fucked-up headset mic that would not record my narration

3. To-ing and fro-ing between my PC and a laptop with a built-in microphone, only to discover I couldn't find the record function in the website when the app was opened on the laptop

4. Recording my script on my phone and emailing the audio file to myself

5. Contemplating selling everything I own and fucking off to live in Mustique, notwithstanding the sale of my worldly goods would probably only see me good to relocate in Newcastle one-and-a-half hours down the road

6. Discovering You Tube won't support an m4a

7. Finally - FINALLY! - getting my presentation into an MP4 and putting it in Movie Maker, and then working out how to add my m4a to it

8. Having the library scan and email my scripted work as a PDF, and then discovering the assessment platform wouldn't accept a scanned file

9. Putting out the call on Facebook to convert Word to PDF, and actually DOING IT, and submitting my assessment.

10. Sitting in total delirium that I learnt how to do this stuff

Yeah, it's been a bizarre week, but the way I feel right now; if anyone wants me, I'm out churning butter and will only answer to 'Rachel'.