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Monday, March 22, 2010

Distant From Learning

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This DL debacle of the past couple of days has affected thousands of students and has lost thousands of cumulative work hours by students and professors.

Why don't we put the administrators online--that way no one will notice if they go down?

The university PR machine will certainly play down this bungle.

Unknown said...

That's what happens when spaced-out postmodernists, with too much prior knowledge of Foucault and Derrida, try to commingle the anti-matter of their alterity with the "real" world.

The absence of their presence (or is it the presence of their absence??) warps the fabric of the space-time continuum until everything gets FUBAR.

Anonymous said...

About this Blackboard meltdown and fallout: I am a heavy user, but I have never have had much confidence its our just-in-time electronic delivery system of important educational services. Our educational mission is obviously threatened by this fragile, fickle, complicated, temperamental and out-of-control electronic golem and our “highly recommended” and addictive dependency on it.

Where Blackboard is concerned my philosophy to this point has been “expect the worst and hope for the best,” and so I am primarily responsible for putting all my teaching eggs in the Blackboard basket. Now with this spectacular failure of the system and the ensuing lack of explanation and responsibility for its failure by its innovators and boosters I am swearing off any more reliance on the Blackboard megaclunker and its ilk.

I say we return to the flesh-and-blood professor-centered classroom lecture and resurrect widespread respect for the classroom podium and what it represents in higher-education knowledge reproduction is the long-term solution to dependency on the almighty microchip.

This system failure and our administrators’ reluctance to take responsibility and to actually blame professors (for not having backup plans in anticipation for the failure of a system they peddled to us as “safe”) is the Toyota of our most recent higher education experience here at UT. A memorable experience indeed!

It's not too late. Let's shake off the monkey of electronic dependency in public higher education! Students! Demand the quality eyeball-to-eyeball classroom educational experience you expect, pay for and deserve!