This week I found myself on a roller coaster of emotions, as far as this class is concerned. On the one hand, I felt that most of the tasks that we were required to do this week were fairly easy and minimally frustrating. But on the other hand , I found myself in the computer lab for longer periods of time trying to figure out how to do other important tasks that were not necessarily part of the assignment, but things that are necessary for my future in this course, namely, transferring my home work document from my disk into my homepage file on Netscape. I must have spent at least three hours on that task alone, and that wasn't even part of the assignment.
My ratings for this week's assignment differed from last week's. I actually find this interesting because I rated this week's task as slightly more difficult than last week's task, but the negative emotions that doing the tasks cost me was act ually less this week than last week. I said that the tasks this week were more difficult, but actually, only one task gave me problems -- the task of sending a document to myself.
At first, I thought the task was so easy because all I had to do was go under file to mail document and type in my e-mail address and "viola!" there my document would be. Little did I know that it would not be so easy. When I went to my e-mail account to check if the document was there, I didn't even receive the actual document, but a message about consenting to some kind of agreement. I was confused at first, but then I went back to Netscape and played around with mailing the document, and I figured out what I was doing wrong...or so I thought. Actually, the second time, my document did get sent through, and I felt very proud and satisfied that I had solved a problem by myself. But then the message spontaneously deleted itself for some rea son, and there I was again, accelerating down the downward slope of that emotional roller coaster. Rather than giving up, I went back to Netscape and tried again, and this time, trying a new method, I was able to send myself the document. In fact, I am proud to say that I was able to send myself not one, but three copies of the document. What a rush! Because of my persistence, I rated myself very highly in trying hard to get through this week's tasks.Ironically, even though I found this, my most difficult task, to be more difficult than last week's task, I did not feel as many negative emotions as last week. I think a lot of that has to due with the fact that I'm more confident than I was l ast week with working on the internet, so when problems arose, I didn't feel like it was the end of the world. Because I had already been successful at many tasks on the internet, I felt somewhat invincible in my ability to accomplish more tasks. Anothe r reason why I felt less negative emotions is because I got used to the Netscape system. Much of the reason why I rated my amount of negative emotions as high last week, is because I felt impatient much of the time, waiting around for the computer to hoo k up to host computer. I think that this week these time lapses did not seem to be of such great magnitude because I knew that they would be there, and so, I could be more patient and understanding about them.
Other than this one task, I found the other tasks to be quite easy and fairly straightforward. When I tried other search engines, I was actually disappointed to a certain degree, by what they found. At first I was excited because I thought tha t I had stumbled across something that could be valuable to me for "Health Related Internet", but most of what I found in the file turned out to be highly uninformative, so I was very disappointed because this file had the appearance of one that I would b e interested in.
While I find that this ability to use different search engines will be very useful in the future, most of the other tasks this week are tasks that I do not think I will be using in the future. Because I do not use my own computer, I will proba bly not be using bookmarks or saving images to my hard drive. However, I do feel that sending a document to myself by e-mail will be useful in the future, although not something that I would consider vitally important. If I like a document enough to kee p it on hand, I could merely print it out. I was very excited when I discovered what viewing source files entailed because this gave me insight as to how other people constructed their homepages, and I figured that in the future, when our task is beautif y our homepages, I will want that source information. Lastly, the use of different search engines I do believe, will come in handy in the future, although I did not find any search engines to my satisfaction this time around.
Because I did find these tasks to be easy, I a confident that I will be getting good at this week's tasks. Much of what we have done so far is merely a matter of clicking on a certain link, or going to the top of the page to click on something, which an ybody can do. I am beginning to wonder if that's how the internet is meant to be. At first, I thought that the internet, and computers in general for that matter, were cryptic, and only people who knew the codes could access the information. I am begin ning to think that perhaps this is not so difficult as I had first believed. The internet is not so scary after all!
This newfound realization gives me much greater satisfaction about this week's tasks as compared to last week's, and I am feeling much more realistic about the internet and about this class. At first, I really did not think that I'd be able to survive in this class. All the work seemed so overwhelming. Now I am beginning to see that my fears were unfounded and actually makes me feel better about myself, too, because I am exploring new territory which I never thought I would be exploring, and I have a great sense of accomplishment.