Six Years to Obsolescence
Jan. 16th, 2004 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deviNone of them even like computers. My IT class sit there like sacks of potatoes, jaws adangle and eyes agape, like the kids in Ferris Bueller's school. They are taking IT because they aren't bright enough for Computing, which actually includes actual programming, or they think it'll look good on their CV. IT is everyone's poor-cousin subject, shoved to the dusty corners of their revision plans and coloured in with the least pretty felt-tip. And no wonder. It's bloody boring. I have trouble staying awake when I teach it; no wonder they do too.
My class is the last refuge of the apathetic and the inept, who have given up Maths or Politics because it was too difficult. They all have dogs who love to eat floppy discs, especially ones with homework on them. Several of them seem to be permanently asleep. One of them spent five minutes explaining to me that he didn't have his coursework because the server was down at half-term. What has that to do with now? I asked. I've seen your coursework since half-term and it was fine. No, no, he finally said, I was in just after New Year, and it emerged that he thought it was the Christmas holidays which were called 'half-term', rather than the holiday which is halfway through term. Right.
I talk about the Data Protection Act. I talk about how IT affects office work. I talk about the necessity of teamwork, organisation and attention to detail for IT workers, and about the old image of the lone programmer working in a fugue state through the night which has now mostly passed away. Coursework is based on mastering a major piece of commercial software; it's actually forbidden to code anything new. I have to teach a piece about the dishonesty and unfairness of using work computers for personal mail. It's all grey, flat and grey.
I flash back to colour and excitement. Summer 1998, to be exact. I was in the first year of a brand new ICT course and had scooped a summer job programming routers in Java. It was neuron-twangingly hard (I'd only been programming for less than a year) and frequently drove me to distraction, but I was proud of myself for having got it. We were all proud of ourselves, and excited about the future. We were on mailing lists about 'the philosophy and psychology of cyberspace'; we thrilled to MUDs and MOOs and all the other miniature worlds floating out there. We were all Neo (except with personalities), shaping the world with our code, intoxicated with information. We knew Pulp's 'Mis-Shapes' was about the poor, but it spoke for us too, the weird kids from school, surging into the new world powered by the one thing we had more of, our minds.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gothwalk spoke for many of us when he wrote on his webpage "I love the Internet with a passion that knows no bounds."
Six years ago. Six years! Is that all?
I feel like Oisin returning from Tir na nOg. He thinks he's been away for three years, but the instant his foot touches the soil, he feels three hundred years thud into his bones. He looks around through suddenly rheumy eyes and sees an unknown, humdrum country, chopped into little fields. Magic has departed and his band of heroes have gone, and all around, dull alien bells are tolling the faithful to orderly, pre-written prayer.
My class is the last refuge of the apathetic and the inept, who have given up Maths or Politics because it was too difficult. They all have dogs who love to eat floppy discs, especially ones with homework on them. Several of them seem to be permanently asleep. One of them spent five minutes explaining to me that he didn't have his coursework because the server was down at half-term. What has that to do with now? I asked. I've seen your coursework since half-term and it was fine. No, no, he finally said, I was in just after New Year, and it emerged that he thought it was the Christmas holidays which were called 'half-term', rather than the holiday which is halfway through term. Right.
I talk about the Data Protection Act. I talk about how IT affects office work. I talk about the necessity of teamwork, organisation and attention to detail for IT workers, and about the old image of the lone programmer working in a fugue state through the night which has now mostly passed away. Coursework is based on mastering a major piece of commercial software; it's actually forbidden to code anything new. I have to teach a piece about the dishonesty and unfairness of using work computers for personal mail. It's all grey, flat and grey.
I flash back to colour and excitement. Summer 1998, to be exact. I was in the first year of a brand new ICT course and had scooped a summer job programming routers in Java. It was neuron-twangingly hard (I'd only been programming for less than a year) and frequently drove me to distraction, but I was proud of myself for having got it. We were all proud of ourselves, and excited about the future. We were on mailing lists about 'the philosophy and psychology of cyberspace'; we thrilled to MUDs and MOOs and all the other miniature worlds floating out there. We were all Neo (except with personalities), shaping the world with our code, intoxicated with information. We knew Pulp's 'Mis-Shapes' was about the poor, but it spoke for us too, the weird kids from school, surging into the new world powered by the one thing we had more of, our minds.
gothwalk spoke for many of us when he wrote on his webpage "I love the Internet with a passion that knows no bounds." Six years ago. Six years! Is that all?
I feel like Oisin returning from Tir na nOg. He thinks he's been away for three years, but the instant his foot touches the soil, he feels three hundred years thud into his bones. He looks around through suddenly rheumy eyes and sees an unknown, humdrum country, chopped into little fields. Magic has departed and his band of heroes have gone, and all around, dull alien bells are tolling the faithful to orderly, pre-written prayer.
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-16 06:46 pm (UTC)It does suck, but I am telling you there's good stuff around yet.
Me, I'm still in wonderment at AI, regardless of how jaded some people may be at its capabilities. I'm fairly excited about worlds where AI cooperatively tells a story.
Don't feel so old. Save it for when you really are, and you've got nothing else to do. *grins*
Will I see you soon?
no subject
Date: 2004-01-16 07:02 pm (UTC)I don't know yet, to be honest - I told the mammy I'd try to get over for one weekend of half-term (the one that's halfway through the *spring* term, this time :) ) but I haven't had a chance to think any further about it at all, let alone book anything. If I do, though, I'll make sure I devote lots of time to catching up with people - what are your dates again?
Thanks for the rest of it. I know there's lots of wonder in the world. It's just that so much has leached out of this particular bit of it.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-16 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-16 08:28 pm (UTC)There is a very strict curriculum. I have gone off on tangents, though (for example I gave a two-hour lecture once about the history of the Net and the bits that were around before the Web, then logged them all onto a talker. It was the best IT class I ever did). They are the sort of kids who would sneer at people with online diaries, but I might talk about Salam Pax anyway - good idea.
It's not about the culture of the net, really, though. The vast majority of it is dry, dry stuff about IT in business. Like, how to lay out a workstation to avoid RSI, that sort of thing.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-16 08:44 pm (UTC)as to the apathy of your students, I think thats why they can't see the wonders of the web, so they'll miss out on cool things like dict servers and genuinely useful websites.
Funnily just the other day I had the exact opposite experience, I had coded a fairly basic picture database, and on demonstrating it to the finance department I was greeted with an awe formerly reserved (in stories) by primitive peoples for the great white wizard across the sea.
What I'm mangling saying is although the medium has changed, the magic is there for those who care to see it, sounds like your class just aren't interested in anything much at all :
no subject
Date: 2004-01-16 09:17 pm (UTC)I know what you mean about the retelling - in fact I think it was put together by a couple of schoolkids itself. But it was the shortest and the simplest I could find.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-17 12:11 am (UTC)I know what you mean, I talk to my family and some of my friends about the glory and wonder of the internet, the potential I see, about what it has achieved and what heights it has yet to reach and I see their eyes glaze over. They are still allegedly paying attention to me and they're still in the room (I can be a hard man to ignore at times), but they aren't listening. They see computers and the internet as basic resources, as knowledge sources to be mined and treated like a stapler or a dictionary.
I could despair, I could go back to my network and my peers and just rant to them, discuss and explore with those who are already converted. I could decide that the mass of people don't care and that nobody now living will ever understand the beauty of the islands I have seen (to run with your analogy), but I'm not willing to do that. I know the passion you felt and still feel, I remember when you despaired of DCU because you couldn't get the usenet access you wanted, I know whereof you speak.
It was only six years, or in my case ten years or more since I discovered what a modem could do for me. The science is still young, the passion still simmering, the true breakthrough yet to come as we preach and practice in equal measure across the infinite realms of cyberspace. The vast majority will never feel the passion we felt, that is reality, that is humanity, but if we keep talking it up then maybe they will treat it less like a boring resource and more like a living, breathing community, and if we don't, who will.
Keep the faith, don't reach down to pick up the rock, stay in the clouds, your internet needs you.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-17 11:34 pm (UTC)I remember when you despaired of DCU because you couldn't get the usenet access you wanted
Oh my God, that brings me back. I had to plough through piles of bureaucracy for months and get a special yellow form *signed by a lecturer*, just to get the sysadmins to add rec.arts.sf.written to the newsfeed :)
Usenet. I used to consume it in vast quantities. On a green and black VT100. Them was the days.
Sounds depressing !
Oh FFS ! It's a good thing I'm not teaching your class. That bit would come out terribly sarcastic !
As far as the rest goes, look at it this way: The trouble with the rise of computing is that it's a way for clever people (who by and large did pretty well for themselves anyway) to do better, whilst dim people become less employable. What you represent is the last realistic hope for a bunch of kids who aren't holding three aces to raise their game enough not to crash and burn horribly.
Sure, it's their least favourite subject and they don't take it seriously, but when they're applying for their first 11K/yr dead-end job in an insurance office they won't get employed because they have a C and two Es, they'll get employed because they have some clue how to use a standard software package or two.
Re: Sounds depressing !
Date: 2004-01-17 11:44 pm (UTC)You're on to something there. In my Sociology class (which I love teaching, thank gods for Sociology, it more than makes up for IT) I recently taught a segment about how working-class kids used to band together into anti-school subcultures where they learned to avoid work and deal with boredom and have a laugh whenever possible... because they were destined for zero-qualification factory jobs where the main survival skills would be dealing with boredom and having a laugh.
Then came computers, and robots, and globalisation, and there were no more zero-qualification factory jobs, and if you're disaffected with the whole academic thing today, knowing MS Office can be the only thing standing between you and oblivion (or call centre work; pretty much the same thing).
no subject
Date: 2004-01-18 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-19 01:41 pm (UTC)