Nikki Moore

This past week, the tech assistant Nikki Moore came to our class to discuss the multiple assets that the Penn State ANGEL website can offer to students. I will willingly say that I am not very computer savvy so this experience was somewhat intimidating for me. Penn State has one of the largest student bodies in the country, so my expectations of the online resources were not bright. However as soon as Nikki began talking I felt comforted. She seemed like the type of person that was in the same boat as me at one point in her life. She spoke with so much simplicity that it made me feel like I was Steve Jobs, and for me, that was a good start.

Nikki first showed the class a site called lynda.com. This site was basically a search engine for tutorials on various types of computer softwares. This especially caught my interest. As a photographer, photoshop is a highly needed tool and I do not know how to use it very well. Nikki went over to the examples of what software was on lynda.com, and lo and behold the first example was for photoshop. At that point almost all my anxiety and frustrations with my current technology knowledge disappeared.

After her brief introduction to lynda.com, Nikki began to show us the different navigation tools in ANGEL. She made it seem so simple, I almost could not believe that I had no understanding of it beforehand. I will admit, the content was not the most exciting in the world, and it definitely did not seem to get the class to sit on the edge of their seats, but it was informative. Nikki did exactly what she needed to do, and I really appreciated how she stayed away from getting into the excruciating technological details.

Finally, with about roughly thirty minutes before class came to an end, Nikki went into the meat and potatoes of her lesson: the blog. I have never blogged before, and for me at least, blogging seemed like something twelve year old girls did when they had nothing better to do. You could say that I was not very excited. However, Nikki came through again. The customization options of our own websites was what really grabbed my attention. Again, Nikki emphasized the simplicity of creating these websites and blogs which kept me from a frustrating experience. I give my thanks to  Nikki, with her visit, I became a functioning member of the technological society.

 

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