19 October 2006
computer says no
Now, I love the internet almost as much as I love pork pies, my stuffed dog and the literature of Thomas Bernhard, but I have to say that the Blairite hyper-clunky bureaucratised infatuation with the internet as a tool for teaching and registration is SPREADSHEET PSYCHOSIS GONE MAD. The gleam of insanity in the brain of a lowly academic after 5.4 hours sat on yet another subcommittee (without even any tea or coffee)...I know! Why don't we pay a million trillion pounds to set up an on-line system to make everything easier ALL THE WHILE KNOWING THAT IT WILL NEVER EVER EVER EVER work properly (cf. the NHS).
Students are not registered; their courses are not properly listed on their 'personalised web package'. Part of the problem is you need to log onto the system in order to be told how to use the system. If no one tells you there even IS a system then you literally have no idea what you're doing or even what your name is.
My solution is to send out a TYPED letter to all students before they arrive with a date and a time on it. We meet them, you know, with our faces, make sure they know which classes they're taking, register them for the year and send back the names to the mysterious central committee who can then work out the human composition of the university body for themselves. De-centralisation! Anarcho-syndicalist efficiency! We wouldn't even need to discuss it in meetings! Let alone for a thousand mind-numbing hours in which you get so bored you start idly wondering who in the room, if forced, you would have sex with (in the end I went for the aged William Morris lookalike with the lisp. It was originally going to be the dance teacher - flexible - but she was way too in love with the agenda numbering system).
Students are not registered; their courses are not properly listed on their 'personalised web package'. Part of the problem is you need to log onto the system in order to be told how to use the system. If no one tells you there even IS a system then you literally have no idea what you're doing or even what your name is.
My solution is to send out a TYPED letter to all students before they arrive with a date and a time on it. We meet them, you know, with our faces, make sure they know which classes they're taking, register them for the year and send back the names to the mysterious central committee who can then work out the human composition of the university body for themselves. De-centralisation! Anarcho-syndicalist efficiency! We wouldn't even need to discuss it in meetings! Let alone for a thousand mind-numbing hours in which you get so bored you start idly wondering who in the room, if forced, you would have sex with (in the end I went for the aged William Morris lookalike with the lisp. It was originally going to be the dance teacher - flexible - but she was way too in love with the agenda numbering system).
