Following

I'm not sure what "following" means. But I've just started to "follow" my own blog, so I can figure it out. What happens now?

Learning about technology (not)

I'm more than troubled by the fact that it seems that nearly every time I find something that I can use in my courses it turns out that its technical problems are not only hidden until I actually put students in a position to have to use it, but are also problems that nobody seems to have an easy solution to. On Blogger, for example, I've got a student who's been unable to set a blog up because while he's trying to sign up the program insists that he give a cell phone number so it can text him an authorization code: he doesn't have a cell phone, but when he borrows one and uses that number no code ever arrives. As far as I can tell, there is no help line or FAQ that deals with this issue. I'm stuck.

Or I set up a routine where student need to save HTML file to a Web directory on the university server, and it turns out that Word is saving HTML with strange codes for apostrophes, etc., and the students can't figure out how to fix it. Nor can I. These don't seem to be serious problems, I guess, except when you're in the position of having required someone to do something that turns out to look impossible to them -- and you can't help them do it. And you can't go back and say, let's do this another way.