“Technologically Challenged - A Short Story.” Good morning #TeamJustice friends. As you may have heard me admit before, I’m not just bad with technology, I’m downright e-incompetent. So when I leaned that my teaching responsibilities at George Washington University would ...
move from the classroom to teaching online I was . . . less than thrilled. Ok, I was petrified (and I once had a hitman following me, so I generally don’t scare easy). Don’t get me wrong, I know how important it is for students to stay safe and practice social distancing,
so online teaching makes perfect public health sense. But trying to teach me something new on the computer machine is like trying to teach a dog calculus. No matter how many treats you offer us, we ain’t gonna learn much. Still . . . I dutifully met the the smart, helpful and
patient GWU Information Technology staff. These wonderful young women & men tried to explain how I could effectively use something called the Blackboard Collaborate system to begin teaching my Criminal Justice class online. They told me which computer buttons to push,
which switches to toggle, which features to activate - all of which sounded like a foreign language to me. I have to admit that when computer savvy people start talking about gigabytes it always makes my mega hurts. And I don’t even what that means. But
after lots of trials and errors, many mistakes and a fair amount of yelling at my computer (which rarely makes the computer behave any better), I actually managed to begin teaching my class online. When I sign on to the “Live Session” every Tuesday and Thursday morning,
my 40 students are in their virtual seats waiting for class to begin. They can see and hear me, they can ask me questions either audibly or by using the “chat function” (ok, now I’m just showing-off my newly-acquired grasp of fancy e-lingo). So things seemed to be
going pretty good, e-wise. But then, I encountered a problem. Toward the end of each semester, I show my students an HBO documentary called “Thug Life in DC .” The 1998 Emmy-Award-winning film is about a defendant I prosecuted named Andre Bruno. Andre decided he wanted a
“Police Glock” - a police officer’s 9 mm service weapon. So Andre decide the way to get one was to shoot a police officer & steal his Glock pistol. It was a horrific crime and a challenging case to prosecute. The documentary actually goes inside the DC Jail to interview Andre
as he awaits trial. It’s an interesting and well-done documentary, IMO. Given that I’m now teaching online, I needed to figure out how to show the documentary, which I have only on DVD, to my class. So I again contacted the GWU IT folks. They started talking about
“converting formats”, “uploading programs”, using something called “Zoom” & “enabling screen-sharing.” I’m not sure, but I think they said the process also involves a “flux capacitor.” So, of course, I figured the best thing to do was . . . just not show the video this semester.
But then . . . I decided I would NOT let technology defeat me. There had to be a way to show a DVD to my class online without me having to become a computer programmer or IT specialist. Turns out, my techno-incompetence is the mother of invention. I knew I could watch the DVD
by just popping it into the old DVD player that’s still connected to my TV. If my students can see ME during our online sessions then why couldn’t they see . . . my TV? It’s kinda like have my 40 students sitting in my living room (virtually, that is) watching TV w/me. Therefore: 
That’s right - my laptop computer pointed at the TV, sitting on top of a kitchen-breakfast-bar-stool, sitting on top of an ottoman seems to work pretty good. And no need for a flux capacitor . . . I think Rube Goldberg would be proud.
