This is going to be kind of weird but I don’t know what else to do. 
Andrea Mercado of LibraryTechtonics has a new post, Article in Conversants. Recommended, by the way.
I read her post and then her article, Making library schools smarter. Conversants is using CommentPress which I am happy to see, but until I know whether I will read and comment regularly I really have no desire to set up yet another account. So I went back to Andrea’s post and attempted to make a comment there. Eventually I got a captcha but with no image. Seems to be a fairly frequent issue with some of those captcha plugins, unfortunately.
So I refreshed the page hoping to maybe luck out. No luck and it also told me I was submitting a duplicate comment. Huh? Did I or did I not succeed the 1st time? OK. She has an email contact form. Paste my comment in there, explain the situation and how I hope I’m not unknowingly overloading her and hit send.
Nope. That failed too.
Now, honestly, this comment is not that important. But I would like to talk with Andrea about her undergrad alma mater and I was hoping that email contact form would be my means of doing so.
I imagine there are lots of reasons these things could be failing me. OCLC and Voyager were certainly screwing with me enough today so maybe it is me. But some days I really despise the internet. You try and have a conversation and it does everything in its power to thwart you. Far too frequently.
Captchas that don’t load an image. Completely unreadable images in captchas. Requiring accounts at a million places. People with Blogger (or other) blogs that only allow those with Blogger/Google accounts to comment. And on and on ad infinitum.
All I can say is this internet thing is at about the level of an 18-month old in conversational skills right now.
Anyway, my comment is reproduced below with the hopes Andrea will see it and perhaps comment so I can get her email addy so I can have the real conversation I want to have. 
Interesting article, Andrea. I wanted to comment over there but until I am sure I will read (and comment) there often I am NOT setting up another account.
In paragraph 7 you talk about tech skills which I can only assume you mean should be had before entering school. How do you intend for schools to pragmatically assess such skills?
Here is a link to our admission requirements and also to those intended to be acquired before leaving:
http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/admissions/requirements/tech.html
By the way, these are being upgraded from the pathetic state they are in right now (floppy disk, anyone?). But they are in no way checked as neither are the ones “expected to be acquired during your time at GSLIS” so I am unsure what purpose they really serve.
I do agree that these are important and that something needs to be done. But how is that to be accomplished? Are we going to require potential students to show up on campus prior to final submission of the application process for an interview? Or are we going to do like some of the preppier schools my boy applied to and have an alum out in the “local” community (perhaps 100s of miles away in reality) do the interviewing? That could be a long, slow process until we get enough qualified alums to do the interviewing.
While both of these might, in fact, be feasible I do not really seeing the schools implementing either.
Any thoughts? Thanks for the link to the article and the journal.
Since I don’t like Captcha (it has all sorts of usability issues, as you note), I make an effort to avoid Captcha at all costs. Despite the fact that Captcha seems to be an effective spam deterrent, and that I have received hordes of comment and email form spam in the past, none of my comment plugins have Captcha as a feature, because I dislike it so much.
So, I was reasonably confused when I saw your post noting that you had received a Captcha when trying to submit a comment on the post on my blog, since I tested these plugins before I launched them (I have the Maintenance Mode plugin which allows me to do this), and had never received a Captcha.
After I saw your post, I logged into WordPress and poked around to troubleshoot the problem. I saw that the comment you left on the post was in my comment moderation queue, because it had multiple URLs in it (and likely because of the accidental second submission). Spam Karma thought that maybe the comment was spam, and wanted me to approve it (but had not yet sent me an email to alert me about it).
Further poking found that deep within the innards of Spam Karma is a setting for Captcha that flipped itself to “enabled” when I last upgraded the plugin, when it had been set to disabled before the upgrade. The comments are not purposely or normally booby trapped with Captcha, and I apologize for the inconvenience.
Because refreshing the page made WordPress think you were submitting a dupe post, when you tried to send me email through my form (which is also protected by the spam plugins), the plugins thought you were trying to spam me with the form (I used to get tons of email form spam before I set up this feature). Therefore, it didn’t let you send the message. My apologies for my overprotective spam helpers.
That said, I’m more than happy to pursue the discussion of your comment on my blog, now that I’ve approved it from the comment moderation queue.
In the meantime, I’ve changed the maximum number of URLs in a comment to 3, and at some point when I have time, I’ll add something to the comment area of the template that states that more than 2 URLs will send the comment to moderation, so that people know ahead of time.
Thank you for pointing this out.
You are quite welcome, Andrea. I may have to chat with you, too, about the email spam options.
I am getting far less than I used to but still getting way too many, especially since that is why Comcast changed my email account & address without bothering to tell me 1st.
And please do move the conversation back to your blog. Just glad you got it figured out. But now I get to add “self-correcting” plugins to my list.
I’ll send you an email soon (day or so probably) about what I particularly want to ask you about.
For what it is worth – a few years ago … as an instructor in GSLIS I used the technology listing to help make the case that the HTML skills needed to do an assignment were reasonable for me to expect students to develop. I’m going to chose to not go into how frustrating it was to have students who thought this is a skill they didn’t need to develop.
Hi Lisa and thanks for the comment.
I fully understand your point. I worked in User Services at GSLIS for 2.5 years of my 4 years (so far) there. In that capacity I frequently taught (extremely) basic HTML to our students; most of them at the point where they were required to use it for a project.
The point that I utterly failed to make clear in my comment to Andrea is that no matter what is on that list–and it desperately needs updating, and is being updated but by committee as usual so will be a while–is that they need to be actionable.
That is, we (GSLIS) needs to find a way to ensure that we (as students) meet what they say we need to meet. It needs to matter. And right now it does not.
That is a shame!