Tuesday Feb 22, 2011
A & M Students what is your take? Sound Off in comments below
Help, It’s 1968 Again!
They Walk Among us
Bill Engvall, Blue Collar Comedy Tour
These types were a lot easier to spot when I was in college. Back then they sported short hair, the style was a crew-cut no doubt named for some sort of Navy inspired just cut it off hairstyle. This fraternity was easily spotted via the tell tale ‘yep he’s one for sure’ ten inch slide rule hanging off his belt. And the top of the heap of this fraternity was distinguished by the plastic shirt pocket protector, all the better to carry as many pens, mechanical pencils and such as possible, you never know when a calculus problem might pop up that needs addressing.
At least back then, this bunch was pretty well confined to the engineering building. At UT Austin this was a good distance north east of the business building. Like an African veldt replete with carnivorous lions, we did not need to go there. It was clear they enjoyed entire classes consumed with working perhaps a dozen arcane math problems in one semester. One could only hope this personality type was not contagious, as they say in Public Health Circles.
But it was. Like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, (the Donald Sutherland second version is the best of the three made so far) they began morphing into other disciplines. Worse, they became gender friendly, now women were among their recruits. Their first big break came when Gates bought Seattle Computing and MS DOS was born. Their trademark signature was all over the DOS commands. In the world of Apple, one clicks and drags to copy a file to a folder. But in the nerd world, user friendly is not in the lexicon. Code writers, cast adrift as Fortran and COBOL faded, gravitated to DOS to give us commands like *.*a:/bd.copyfile.txt (okay the fog of time precludes an exact reproduction but it was right there with earaches and solving the algebra problem about the two trains starting at different times). This pretty well insured their continued existence as any normal person would certainly roll their eyes and conclude it was time for lunch, even at 8:30 AM.
The advent of Windows, snatched from Apple, might have thinned their ranks, one would hope, but no. Like the Greek Lernaean Hydra, two more heads appear as one is vanquished. This group has now morphed into writing the programs for electronic bulletin and blackboards, widely used in higher education. (remember the amorphous cyborg who could blend into the checkerboard floor in Terminator II?) And of course their signature is all over this newest movie like a B Grade serial, Return of DOS, the Nightmare at Your Terminal.
I thought I signed up to be a teacher, but not when this bunch is in charge of the electronic homework. The pod people have captured my Mojo and banished it to the basement of that Engineering Building in 1968. There are more choices than a $6.98 Chinese lunch buffet. Hit one wrong key and the students are shut out of the sixteen problems I just posted. Fail to see the oh just move the mouse here rather than check a box option, and no points are assigned to those problems. And, like HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey, apparently the program can read my lips as I talk to the monitor. I swear it re-arranges the various options while I sleep.
Ah but you say, most word processors have global search, you can fix that all at once, right? No way, each assignment stands on its own, it’s the revenge of the DOS copy command, risen from the grave of the IBM 5150/8088. You might thing it would be tough to create homework and assign zero points to it, nah, I did it on the first try. No doubt this makes for lots of laughter at Pod Programmer Friday afternoon get -together (hey did you hear the teacher assigning homework with No points, hahahahah we sure showed him ….)
One might think beta testing, trying it on a small group before releasing it to the big one, would be an engineering construct. No way, how could you wreak havoc and create the need for Bulletinboard Version 19.86 to fix Version 19.85 if you did that. And so the program is never left alone along enough for anyone outside the pod world to comprehend its intricacies. This semester pod programmers attempted to implement student codes in the background (instead of issuing them) to allow log on to, across the entire United States of America no less. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it, needless to say three weeks later, they were back to issuing codes. This was right after they suggested we put everyone on a trial basis so students could access the homework they were locked out of due to the new whiz bang we will fix it in the background…(readers confused trying to follow this should just substitute, remember New Coke for this paragraph….)
In the movie version, the pod people are patiently waiting for one to fall asleep, then they move in and take your soul. I’m trying to stay awake, But a recent e mail just announced that two bulletin boards have joined forces, the next big thing they call it, But wasn’t that the tag line for Y2K as well?
Rumor has it that a group of revolutionaries are staring a new approach. Hidden in the attic of the Library Education Building (who would think to look in the library for education…) they are working on a new Bulletin Board, promising it will be to the pod programmers as Kryptonite was to Superman. And they call it,
Big Chief Tablet.
Back to the Future, eh?
Dennis Elam teaches at an undisclosed Higher Ed facility, and is wanted by various pod programmers for ‘re-education’
