HPR0645: The Dinosaur's Dilemma

Intro: Most of us grow into our computer knowledge gradually, starting because of an innate curiosity, figuring things out through trial and error, desiring to accomplish certain tasks, or just possessing a genetic predisposition to geekiness.  But what would it be like as a non-geek to come from a non-technical background and be thrown into “the deep end of the pool,” challenging yourself to learn as much as you could from scratch, and to learn it all as quickly as you could?  In Curbuntu’s first interview with “Baylee Juran,” a career public-school teacher (and self-described technological “dinosaur”), Baylee shares what motivated her to lay aside a comfortable, if frustrating, teaching paradigm in the hope of evolving into a 21st-Century instructor.  (Note: No cockatiels were harmed in the recording of this interview.)

Links: Books and websites mentioned—

• Making Money Teaching Online: How to Land Your First Academic Job, Build Credibility, and Earn a Six-Figure Salary by Danielle Babb and Jim Mirabella
• Where Baylee’s “second life” started: SecondLife
• Baylee’s website: TeaCupCoffeeHouse.com

Technical notes: For those of you interested in contributing first-time episodes to HPR, this interview was recorded in Ubuntu 10.04.1 over Skype using Skype Call Recorder for Linux.  (The version for “Ubuntu / Kubuntu 8/9, i386“ seems to work fine, even on the 64-bit, 10.04 version of the operating system.)  Post-processing (e.g., editing, adding musical HPR intro & outro, normalization, exporting to MP3, etc.) was done with Audacity 1.3.12-beta.  Audacity-generated MP3 meta-tags were verified with EasyTAG 1.2.6.

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