Thursday, December 17, 2015

Thursday Jeopardy

Class today was all about different ways of researching things. The various methods seemed scattered and  disorganized; each one individually had its merits and obviously worked effectively enough for the organization to have success, but as a whole there seemed to be chaos.
It's the first day of substantive training, so I might not be surprised at this appearance, but another clue is in the repeated refrain that the thing to be taught was not any individual facts or even a large collection of them, but rather the ability to look things up. This sounded like a platitude, until the final hour which was a game of Jeopardy based upon typical questions. At first my team did poorly and I felt down; the other team was ahead more than two to one. However when one of my teammates expressed dismay, I felt obliged to make some encouraging noises, along the lines of this being our time to come back in the second half. Then the Jeremy on our team ( there were Jeremy's on both teams ) answer the question and when asked how he knew it, said he did not know it but he knew how to search on that website. Haha! I proceeded to answer a couple of questions based entirely upon selecting the correct search facility. It worked! Our team roared into the lead. When we got down to the last question  there was some logic involved; we had had 5 instructors and since four of them had been answers to the other questions, I simply picked the remaining one and it had to be right!
Then there was Final Jeopardy! We were ahead, but not light enough to ensure victory without the right answer. The other team got the opportunity to read their answer first, and did so correctly. Then the judges turn to our team. How could we show we have the right answer, when nothing was written down? I simply turned my monitor around - I had not only found the right answer, my search had found found it on a little poster that they could see from up front. Yeah search!
I think this little game was both a confidence building and a team building exercise. We got to see the personalities of each other in a harmless a bit of adversity, & I got to see that lol did not think the overall structure was totally organized, the result was effective! There's a lesson here if I can figure it out.

Blogger On Phone

It just makes sense that a blogger would have a smartphone app. This is my first attempt using it, and it appears to be about as easy as one would expect. This will make it easier to use this log as a journal; note that the speech recognition autocorrect changed "blog" to "log".