As if finishing up my final semester of grad school wasn’t stressful enough, the professor for my Capstone class went missing around the beginning of March. He posted our mid-term exam on March 5th with the due date to be prior to the start of Spring Break a week later.

At the same time, we had two major assignments due – a research paper due on March 31st and a case study on April 16th. Students had plenty of questions about both assignments, but professor wasn’t responding to e-mail or questions in the (online) classroom. He did post an announcement on the 30th that we could have a deadline extension for a week and the Powerpoint in the syllabus was optional and required only for the face to face class. WHAT? Why couldn’t we have known that before we did it?

As the deadline for the next assignment started to get closer, the students were wondering why we hadn’t been assigned a case study to work on or assigned to groups. The assignment was supposed to be a group project and we’re supposed to be assigned a case study to bring up to date. The deadline for the assignment came and went with no word.

Finally, this week we heard from the professor that he was on an emergency business trip to the UK and Ireland and he had no Internet access. That’s a relief that he’s okay and that he’s back now. I just curious how this will all be resolved. As it stands, I have no graded work so far in this class and the final us coming up in a week or so. Am I passing? Am I failing? I don’t know.

I wouldn’t be so worried, but I’m flying out to Maryland for the commencement and I’d really like to know I’m going to walk the stage.

I’m pretty active on Twitter (mostly lurking anyway), but it’s taken me a while to really get into it. For example, tonight we had a large storm come through the area. I’m also a ham radio operator and I’ve been to weather spotter training, though I haven’t volunteered. I prefer to stay home and listen to the other spotters on the ham radio. So, tonight I decided to twitter what the spotters were saying since I knew a few people from the area had started following me on twitter.

It was a really cool experience to interact with other people in the same area and having the same experience. Afterwards, I noticed that I gained several new followers all from this area. Maybe I’ll do more weather spotter twittering in the future.

My biggest challenge has been explaining to friends, family, and co-workers what Twitter is and why they would want to use it. Fortunately, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com has done a better job than I ever could. Have a look.

Beginner’s Quick Start Guide and Tutorial to Using Twitter

Infected Novel