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: 2004-01-17 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.