About Last Night...

Last night I went to my first class for Technical Communication I. It's taught on Tuesday nights at UCSD Extension from 6:30-9:30. I must admit I attended the class with a degree of trepidation, as the previous course I took, Document Design, finished by being rather a washout.

To my pleasant surprise, the class was actually fun! Bonnie Graham, the instructor, is clearly a writer--she has an ironic sense of humor and talks a mile a minute. She doesn't waste time, and keeps things on track. In fact, she kept the beats of the session rolling so efficiently we wrapped up the night at 8:45. I didn't even have time to open my snack! (Coffee was still vital, however.)

Quite a bit of the class is available online, including quizzes. Assignments can also be turned in via the Internet. It seems UCSD is moving more in the direction of online learning, which makes sense especially for professional-development classes, which are frequently attended by folks who work during the day and don't have a lot of time to spare. Plus, with today's gas prices, who wants to spend more time in traffic?

The textbook, I have to say, is a yawner. It's pleasantly enough written, but why does this subject have to be rendered in lifeless hues? And I think the author put it at about 10th grade reading level, which might be great for engineers, but appears condescending to the literati among us.

It was good to see a few people from the document design course in the class, also. So, we shall all suffer, or succeed, together. And there were only 12 students in the class, which made it nice and congenial. The document design course, by contrast, was way overcrowded.