Reflections+Module+4

For this reflection, I decided to share a technology experience I had this week, in hopes of preventing the same thing from happening to someone else! For my multimedia/hypermedia course, I have created several web pages, the first providing an introduction, photo of myself, and links to all of the course projects. The second page was more involved, as it included several examples of photo editing projects I completed over the course of the 2-week module. I was able, with much anxiety, to complete both assignments on time, and received rather positive feedback for a tech newbie. I had saved both projects to my Zipspace (U of A server) so that they could be posted to the Web. Because I worked on the projects from several locations, I mistakenly assumed that saving to the Zipspace was a safe way to always have access to the files, and that I would always be working on the current version. Imagine my surprise this week when I went to access my pages to prepare for yet another miniproject/page, only to find that all of my project files were missing! Sheer panic set in-I had struggled for weeks to complete the projects, and needed the source code to complete the audio editing project due this week! Frantic searching lead to not finding anything, resulting in many hours of effort as I struggle to recreate my previous projects and finish this week’s assignment. Several extremely valuable lessons learned this week:
 * 1) Don’t trust Zipspace!
 * 2) Back up, back up, back up!!!!!! My own children remind me that this was my own stupid fault, but, working from so many locations I felt this was the best option-lesson learned the hard way!
 * 3) Don’t be cheap – buy a great thumb drive or external hard drive. Heading to Best Buy this weekend.
 * 4) If nothing else, print a copy of your page/code. If I had, recreating my projects would have been a breeze. Because I am so new to xhtml coding, I have to constantly refer to reference material, and progress has been slow.
 * 5) Technology is only as good as the person utilizing it-and this time the tech user learned a very valuable lesson.