Oh, what a jolly afternoon yesterday, teaching a development session for folks from the diocese on how to use WordPress in general and the new Scottish Episcopal web template in particular. I’m not sure what it was that made me agree to the foolishness of such a teaching session on my first day back from holiday – must have been the difficulty of several diaries needing to play off one another. However, I’m glad that I did it. I’ve not been in a computer lab for years and there was something rather fun about doing it. My best moment for the afternoon was getting people to learn how to use drop-down menus in less than five minutes and see their faces light up with joy.
The whole thing was very typical of the Scottish Episcopal Church, of course. I suspect that there are not many people in the Anglican world who run a Cathedral who would find themselves teaching webskills on a Monday afternoon to folk from the diocese. I actually like the fact that our church is a bit like that. Our church being like that makes for a very varied life and rewards the generalist who has a bit of skill in a lot of things rather than the specialist who is good only for a narrow range of skills.
I was very interested that the gender balance of the group was 10 to 1 in favour of women. I don’t know what conclusion to draw from this. Could it be for any of these reasons:
- Women do communication and men don’t
- Women think communication is important and men don’t
- Women are more ready to admit they don’t know something and go for training whilst men presume
- Men are more likely to tinker and get something going themselves
- Communication isn’t regarded as important and unimportant things are “women’s work”
- Women are communication positive, men are information positive
- Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus
Anyway, I’m very grateful to all those who were there. It was a very enjoyable afternoon and I got a lot out of it myself. Just like when I did the pilgrimage days in the Cathedral a few months ago, I find myself realising how much I enjoy teaching – something I would never have guessed about myself when I was younger.
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