Today is the first day of Summer School. And I'm terrified.
I'm only teaching one class this summer, a course in computer illustration. I've never taught it before, but since I consider computer illustration my forté, I was thrilled to be asked.
Specifically the class is an introductory course in the Adobe software "Illustrator" and since I've used this software every day for nearly 20 years, I assumed it would be a snap. But about two weeks ago something dawned on me... I've never had any formal training in using it, I'm completely self-taught.
See, here's the thing. I graduated college before the Dawn of the Computer Age. I always considered that a blessing since my school days were spent contemplating design theory and creativity and not glued to a monitor trying to learn every new flash-in-the-pan computer program. It wasn't until the mid-90's that the ad and design industry switched to digital. I walked into my office one Monday morning to discover my drafting table had been set horizontal and plopped in the center of it was a Mac. I didn't even know how to turn it on. Calling the IT department wasn't an option since there wasn't one. In fact, the term "IT" was still a few years off in the future.
Luckily, all that early software was fairly rudimentary and after about a week of trial and error I finally figured it out well enough to get done what needed to be done. Every year after came the release of the next, new version, each time with considerably more bells and whistles. I mastered the functions I needed, but it's safe to say the program does a hell of a lot more than I'm aware of. The once elegantly simple interface now looks like the flight deck of a 747. And I'm expected to teach it.
No problem, I thought, I'll just skim through the text book for the class. And that's when I learned that this quarter is the first in which the school is being thrown into the deep end of... eLearning.
It sounds creepy and it is. It's all... V I R T U A L.
There is no text book.
Instead there's a... portal. An "ePortal".
It's a website where instead of text, there are "webinars". Hours and hours (and hours) of webinars. And for the past two weeks I've been slogging through all of them. And after watching hours and hours (and hours) of instructional video, one thing has become abundantly clear... I am eFucked.
Class starts at 4:00. Can't wait.
