Do you prefer hands-on learning to the more traditional courses and lectures? I was a college webmaster and instructor of web development for ten years, and one of the things that attracted me to the field in 1995 was the rapid pace of new software development, which meant that I had to run just to keep up. I was afraid that in retiring and moving here to Charlottesville that I would lose all the fun and excitement of mastering the new stuff.
How wrong I was! One of the hardest tasks for small nonprofit organizations can be establishing and maintaining a web presence – which now includes the social networking “bells and whistles.” So now I again have a “client list” and I am learning by doing. Sometimes painful, sometimes slow, this is learning that sticks.
One of my former students, a foreign student from Burma, once said of creating web pages that what she liked best was the “happy!” part when everything finally works the way you want it to.
I have been thinking a lot (That’s good, right?) since I read the article quoted below. We are so fortunate in Charlottesville to have so many opportunities for keeping our brains active even after retirement. Of course there are the excellent courses and lectures available from OLLI at UVa and others, but for those like me who really enjoy hands on-learning there are a lot of other ways to keep thinking and learning.
We seniors usually have a lot to say about those things we care about, so you might want to try your hand at blogging. Images can add a lot of power to your blog, and if you enjoy working with images, you may be interested in trying my favorite editing software for web graphics, Adobe Fireworks. I get my best results resizing, refocusing, and improving the colors and brightness of images for the web with the very least effort with Fireworks. I use Photoshop occasionally, but I use Fireworks on a daily basis – the more I learn about it, the more I like it!
Taking Early Retirement May Retire Memory, Too
By GINA KOLATA, Published: October 11, 2010
The two economists call their paper “Mental Retirement,” and their argument has intrigued behavioral researchers. Data from the United States, England and 11 other European countries suggest that the earlier people retire, the more quickly their memories decline.
The implication, …
Continue reading … Memory Decline Accompanies Earlier Retirement, Study Finds – NYTimes.com.
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