A day in the life of an instructional technologist.

Until last month, I had been a RoadRunner customer for years. I never had problems or complaints. That is, until I tried to move my connection to another room earlier this year. It took RoadRunner weeks to troubleshoot the new connection. I missed work, my husband missed work, and worst of all, RoadRunner will tell you they only keep your support information on file for 24 hours. Unless you press the issue, of course. Then they’ll tell you they can reference previous support sessions to keep you from repeating the same troubleshooting steps over and over. In the end, they did fix the connection and we determined my ethernet card wasn’t working. Funny, it was working just fine before the many, many support calls and tech visits.

The good news is that this experience ended up saving me money because I switched to DSL through AT&T. Bellsouth and AT&T are offering great pricing for wireless, home phone, and internet bundles. After doing the math I determined that I’m saving around $30/month. I’ve also heard that AT&T is offering not only mobile to mobile free calling but free calling to anyone with AT&T long distance on their local phone.

I haven’t had to use the support at AT&T yet but it can’t be worse than RoadRunner. That’s just not possible.

When I decided to retool my website at work into something useful, I first thought I would use Blogger. I had used Blogger once before while teaching a class on music technology. But I decided that I wanted the blog to stand on its own and to be hosted on a server other than the web server at work in my personal directory. I knew it was time to break down and buy a my own domain name.

While domain shopping, I considered buying my name as a domain. I decided not to do that for reasons mentioned previously. I didn’t want the blog to be about me, so why would I choose that as a domain? After checking many variations of instructional, technology (two very long words), digital, learning, etc., I was happy to discover that digitalearning.org was available. At that point, I stopped shopping for the cheapest domain/host available and decided to focus on which blog tool I would use. I found this great webpage at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication that compares many blogging tools. After reading the page, I decided on WordPress with price being a big factor. It’s free!

The WordPress website has a lot of great information including information on finding a web host. Based on their recommendations I chose bluehost. There may be better deals out there and I won’t go through all the specs in this post, but after a quick check on Go Daddy and many other recommendations on the WordPress website, I considered their offering the best. I particularly liked the auto installation feature of WordPress and many other tools like TikiWiki and Moodle. A domain name, domain listing privacy, and site promotion are also included in the bluehost offering.

Deciding on a domain name and finding a web host were the easiest parts of the job. After signing up with bluehost and installing WordPress, I then spent what seemed like forever deciding on a theme for my blog. Be warned; there are a ton of themes. You can sort the themes by layout and colors, etc, but I had limited success with this.

If you’re starting a blog with a new domain, best of luck. I hope you’ll find this information useful.

Last year, I was looking at my website at work and I thought, who would look at this? I mean, who wants to see a small picture of me that’s about ten years old, my job description and where I went to school? I had forgotten something I learned in 1996 when I first learned how to create web sites. That is - make it useful. Sure, on my old website I had links to user guides that I had created and to other technology websites. Maybe those were useful. But I realized that for years I had been using the web to research technologies to serve the faculty I support and for my own purposes and that process had been a one way street.

I hope that this blog, which will focus on my personal and professional (instructional) experiences with technology, will be useful, especially to other instructional technologists. Let the opinionated commentary begin!