Starting a new course, and taking a new course

This January term is an intellectually productive time for me -- I'm teaching a new version of my Creative Nonfiction Workshop with an added service learning component, and I'm taking an online digital pedagogy course as a student.

But intellectual production comes with a price.  I like to think of myself as a quick study, and as someone eager to learn. I also like to think that I'm "savvy," or relatively so, when it comes to using electronic media. But today that vision of myself crumbled.

I struggled for at least twenty minutes with a simple task: I wanted to upload two small photographs of my "space" for the J term on my first course post. Nothing seemed to work. When I used the "advanced editor" and tried to add the photographs using a URL from Google Drive, I got a broken link, even when I opened up the photo to viewing by anyone having access to the link (ie, no sign in required).  When I added the photographs as attachments, I first got a message telling me that I could only upload ONE file (though the link asks for "documents," plural), and then another telling me that my post was too big. When I finally settled on one picture to upload as an attachment, it came out massively huge, even though I tried to scale it down. What was I doing wrong?

It wouldn't have bothered me as much as it did if I hadn't been able to see the cute pictures (two of them) of workspace posted by my colleague Valerie -- complete with soulful doggies.  If Valerie was able to post two pictures, why couldn't I? Am I actually unconsciously incompetent at this?  Will I be "that woman" who can't get the thing to work right, no matter how hard she fiddles?

After editing the post for the 4th time, I decided to call it quits, my spirits doused. This is how my students must feel when, for whatever reason, something doesn't work right and they can't follow what seem to be simple directions.

In fact, this kind of snafu happened today during the first CNF Workshop meeting. One of the four students couldn't create a distribution list for our course members because, as her computer kept informing her, she'd "exceeded her quota." True, she had 8000+ emails hanging out in her inbox (and I thought my mom was terrible with her 2000+ stack of digital detritus), but even after we coached her to delete over 400 of them FOREVER she was still over the quota. She struggled with the errors in the public space for about 10 minutes before declaring that she'd just paste the email address list I'd sent to everyone into Google Documents every time she wanted to share.

Somehow, this seemed like surrender.