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| Yet another bad graphic. |
But it's a lot more important for me to sit in a meeting where we give medals to people I don't know or to occupy a chair wearing a fancy outfit while the new flakies and their parents hear inspiring words. But it's ok. It's part of what I do.
Until I remembered...the course management software. It's new! and improved! this year. This apparently means it crashes a lot. I think this is because we are using the free! one.
And the 10 hours I set aside for this week to get my classes into it have so far been two hours of clicking and cursing.
It's going to be a great year.
I'm on sabbatical, so I don't have to attend all the B.S. meetings. We're pretty streamlined anyhow; we have just 1½ days of mandatory meetings every August (with another ½ day that's "optional"), and fully one half a day of that is actually useful (or at least important) information about current enrollment, the financial situation and so forth.
ReplyDeleteTech seemingly gets in the way as much as it helps for me. And I think I'm pretty good at it. But when a centralized kind of technology is "designed" for lots of people to use, it never fits anyone's needs perfectly, and we all end up hobbling along.
ReplyDeleteI feel so lucky...we don't have meetings. Oh wait! I did call a meeting with my TAs yesterday, to see what they look like (and if their English is OK) and let them know what they'll be doing. Took all of 15 minutes.
ReplyDeleteAnd the only thing I use our CMS for is to send mass emails to the class. All the info they need about the course is found on a course page linked to my web page, which I design myself. This way I never have to deal with unsolicited "upgrades" managed by our IT office.
It sounds almost too good...sooner or later some adminiflake is bound to try to stop me from doing things this way.
We were just(as in yesterday) told that we're implementing a new, school-wide, mandatory-use course management program. We will be trained on that program at a mandatory meeting that takes place exactly 17 hours before the start of classes.
ReplyDeleteThat timing sounds familiar. Except at my school it's nearly always lists of things that absolutely must be included in syllabi that arrive 24-48 hours after the last day one could send in syllabi to be copied and reasonably expect them back by the first day of class (on which, the emails with the lists always admonish us, syllabi *must* be available/distributed).
DeleteClicking and cursing should be the name of every technology seminar on campus.
ReplyDelete