Week 4 - ED566E.1

This week's class focused in on user hardware and Microsoft Office applications. The 2007 Office update was especially frustrating for me this summer as a new student at Arcadia. As was mentioned in class, you get used to the way it is - and then they change it to make it more "user friendly". Hiding the print function is not user friendly! I'm glad to have been attuned enough to recognize it when the microsoft office button was clicked upon. The new applications do bring together the best of everything, including other user's ideas and designs for power point background templates. I could spend way too much time designing a power point with all of those options. I feel that this class has offered me a great opportunity to delve deeper into some topics that have always interested me (RSS feeds for one) but I never felt I had the time to devote to finding out more. Now I have to - and it's been great! I was just using my bloglines aggregator to listen to a podcast I've begun to feed there and I've been checking a favorite author's blog updates this way. Last night, we discussed the novelty of new applications and this, like all others, is still novel at this point and I'm having fun with it. In the future, I definitely see the application for helping students to collect research in one central location. I was telling a high school diver about RSS and explaining how it would work to collect information. I'm excited to be able to share new technology and its applicability in the real world.