Late last week I was getting ready to deliver a lecture that I hoped would be a multi-media masterpiece in which the glycosaminoglycan hyaluronic acid (HA) would be at the center.
HA is the goopy snot of the extracellular matrix that all cells are either surrounded by or grab on to. It is also critical in many tissues because it contributes to hydration, fills space, and helps steer migrating cells, including immune cells, to their destination.
HA is also the principal component of the first, new provisional matrix in many wound situations and thus has lots of medical uses.
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Once I had last week's lecture all set up and was ready to start discussing things with the students in front of me, each of us behind our masks, I fired up the Zoom machine so that the young folks from far away and/or those that might have been ill that day, and/or didn't have enough gas to fill their tanks, etc., could participate as well.
These hybrid teaching days I run the Zoom presentation through my box and use my phone to monitor the chat - even kids present in the class use that and I've actually found that this facilitates discussion, especially in large enrolment undergraduate classes where it can be intimidating to ask a question out loud.
Anyway, with all that going on I forgot to hit the 'Record' button so that the lecture could be downloaded afterward from the cloud and archived on the course website.
Which meant that, when I got back to my office, I had to shut the door and do the darned thing all over again.
So, to make sure that my absent-mindedness would not lead to such a (mini-minor) calamity again in the future, I asked my young colleague, the course teaching assistant, to take control of the Zoom as she is one of the most tech-savvy people I know.
Unfortunately, today something went wrong and the transfer from the cloud back to the course website and we lost yet another lecture recording.
As a result, I had to skip my current, assigned task in the lab later in the day, which is to cull the no-longer needed cell stocks in the liquid nitrogen tanks (because the kids in the lab don't want me getting in the way of their actual experiments), so that I could repeat record yet another lecture.
Sheesh.
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Image at the top of the post is the core disaccharide (double sugar) that gets repeated over and over and over and over again in HA.
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8 comments:
Panic when the usual link wouldn't open Zoom five minutes before the AGM of the local Orchestra and Choral Society hereabouts, phone call to VP to warn of possible late entry to the meeting, scramble to locate app, fail, re-download and install, enter through meeting ID and code (never done before) and still managed on time, but frustrated and a little flustered. Thanks for the window on your everyday.
RossK, you do know why its happening NOW.
BlogCrawlitis
Danneau--
Ya...That 'will it work this time' low grade flusteration seems to be there for pretty much everything in our current life.
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NVG--
Ha! You might be on to something there.
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Back in the (low-tech) day, a whole lot of dogs got blamed for eating homework or car keys. They can breathe easier nowadays.
I'm only going to say this once here:
Knitting instruction for adults and children
Lew--
Unless they've been chewing on router connections...
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NVG--
Are you suggesting that a little pre-lecture knitting will calm my tech anxiety addled mind?
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practice run 5 min test?
Anon-Above--
Oh, I already do that...The issue for me is the difference between, as both Ted Lasso and Allen Iverson point out, practice and the actual game of being in front of students both in the room and online when you're trying to make sure that the embedded videos will run both live and through the Zoom box and that nothing gets muted while you make sure you don't miss hands in the air and/or messages in the chat...
Sometimes there are times I long for the days of overhead projectors and, gasp!, chalkboards.
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