Reading as much as I do in and about the internet, it's amazing to me that I've allowed so much text to remain a mystery: Mr. Briggs had me making noises in my hotel room several nights ago, excited that FTP now did more than remind me of Mario Andretti.
As a child there were words I was willing to read over, around, whatever it took to keep from going to the dictionary. It's amazing to me that I would have learned to install a hard drive by 1994 but not have had any idea what RSS meant.
So this course will not only unlock several acronyms, but will refresh my wide-open eyes which have succumbed to the occasional squint that comes from not knowing what you're reading but being too lazy to go find out. The damage is not so much the underlying meaning as it is your confidence as a "traveler" in a new world.
Little did I realize to degree to which I had succumbed to the intimidation that results when certain "road signs" (ftp) are meaningless...I was content to feel left out. As capacity in our machines increased, that meant that so did my intimidation; as new "fixes" or aps increased their reliance upon the original acronyms, so did the amount of intimidation.
How silly to have let this go on for as long as I did: like taking a driving test, this course will teach me to parallel park instead of drive around the block eleven times.
Journalism may well have to dust off its own myopia, as it begins to develop ears as well as eyes: the days when newspapers considered "letters to the editor" interactive are over, as reporters with old-style press passes shoulder up to 13 year old bloggers in Milan during fashion week. The "source" of the news event and the audience were indistinguishable, and the newspaper that thought it was writing to a "tween" who followed fashion (www.businessoffashion.com) realized that day that they were not only both reporting the news, but that the much shorter, much younger reporter was making it as she did so.
I can't be 13 again, and I can't be on the runway, but the new journalism does in fact allow me the "digital space" between those shoulders...I could, if I chose, write a personal note to both of them and then write about the experience for my blog!