Wikis & Class So Far...

So we've been learning about wikis... and I must admit, I thought that the word wiki was only associated with Wikipedia.  Now I know that wikis are pretty much a ready-to-edit website and can be great for collaboration among teachers and students.  As of now, I've been hands-on with learning about wikis through pbworks.com and it's definitely been a bit of a challenge.  In fact, I just gave up 5 minutes ago with editing my personal page -- I wanted to place two separate pictures of my cats on the right side of my last paragraph (one on top of the other), and I can't seem to get my page to look "right."  It's really late, so I will try to fix it in about 7 hours when class starts. Yes, I'm always up extremely late -- I'd like think my brain works better after midnight:)  After editing my page many of times over a period of about 2 hours and then quitting because I was "so over it," it hit me: I spent so much time trying to figure things out on my own, that I could've probably saved a lot of my time if I read/watched some tutorials on how to edit my workspace.  I mean, that is what the Help link as well as the tutorial videos are for.  Could it be that I just have no patience for watching tutorials?  Am I a part of the "A.D.D. Generation"?  And does the question mark before this sentence go before or after the quotation marks?... and I diverge...  I've always thought that I could figure most things out myself, so I seem to always forget to look elsewhere for help.

I've recently discovered that I freak out more easily over assignments in this technology class more than I ever have in my past classes.  I think it's because I'm still insecure about my techno skills, and if it seems that I did something wrong, I'm automatically in flustered-&-frustrated mode.  Take for instance my small "freak out" two days ago.  I edited my professor's pbworks.com workspace, and I thought I did something wrong.  Instead of taking another 5 seconds to explore more of this wiki website, I automatically e-mailed Professor Beard about wrongfully editing his webpage... After clicking on the SEND icon of my email, I went back to my professor's workspace and found out that I did everything correctly.  So here I go, e-mailing Professor Beard once again about "ignoring my first e-mail" and whatnot.  This scenario definitely served as a great lesson:  Be patient and really dive in & explore before jumping to conclusions.  I hope that by the end of this semester, I'll be able to shake off this insecurity.

After two weeks of taking this course, I can say that I'm very comfortable with the environment.  The step-by-step instructions coupled with the classroom website has definitely kept me on track with TPTE 486.  I almost don't know what I would do without the class website!  I was afraid that we would zoom by all of the lessons that we must cover within this semester, but I like the speed of the class that it's moving at.  Overall, I give this class a "so far, so good..."