Okay, well. First off, today is my Last Day of Freedom. I expect no sympathy from you 9-to-5ers out in the crowd; nobody who works a regular job with regular hours can get past that "nearly three months of vacation" thing to muster any sympathy for profs on the day before they return to teaching. (I know it's useless to try to explain this, but still: Imagine that, for the next sixteen weeks, you were going to be scheduled to lead eight meetings per week, all requiring substantial preparation, and where YOU would be the leader, supplying all the energy and motivation. It's hard work. There are no two ways about it, and I deserved every blessed minute I spent sitting by the pool this summer.)

But anyway, now that I have that off my chest . . . I'm sitting here working on my syllabi, and trying to get my course spaces set up, at least marginally. And here comes my Real Gripe. The courseware and web-based collaboration software we have at our disposal is NOT WORKING PROPERLY. Twice this morning I've encountered errors in the courseware - once the courseware just didn't come up, and once I got an error that said "The URL is not valid and the page cannot be loaded", both of which necessitated me doing something else for a while and trying again later. And so far, my mail has crashed once, too. (I can expect mail crashes fairly regularly when I read it over the web.)

I cannot begin to explain how frustrating this all is. It's like that Kurt Vonnegut story or novel (and probably lots of others, too) where people have the implants in their brains to keep them from following a train of thought for too long - periodically they hear loud, jarring noises that knock the ideas right straight out of their heads. That's what it's like trying to get coursework accomplished in this kind of technical environment. Not to mention, everything takes way longer if you have to try to do it several times before you can get it done. I'll now have to go back and try again to create the folders and links I was trying to create before. Last year I got tripped up by this stuff over and over again: I'd sit down to create a quiz, say in the hour before class, and discover that the server was unavailable and I couldn't do it - so I'd have to squeeze out some other time (like, at 10:00 that night) to do it. It feels like my work schedule is never my own. (In fact, to try to illustrate the issues to the administration, I've begun keeping a detailed log of the problems and the delays they cause. It's my hope that maybe such a log will provide a thick description of the kind of productivity loss this sloppy software causes.)

So to cope with this mess, of course, we all develop our workarounds. For me, it means never working natively in the software - I create everything either on paper first, or in a word processor, or in Dreamweaver, and then transfer it all over. (That's another time sink.) And it means always having to be three steps ahead; you have to build in time for everything to go wrong. That wouldn't be so bad (there's no denying I can use the discipline), except that it really throws a monkey wrench into the idea of responsive teaching; you can't have a brilliant idea the day before class and count on being able to implement it, if you're depending on the technology.

And, as always, I'm astonished by the level of sloppiness that gets tolerated in this environment. If Yahoo mail operated the way my school mail does, they'd have no customers. If my hosting service was this flaky, I would certainly have gone elsewhere by now. (In fact, I did dump a flaky hosting service this spring.) If any of the commercial establishments who offer a web presence had service this bad, their businesses would be in serious trouble. And yet, in educational institutions, this kind of malarky is often just tolerated and taken for Panglossian granted.

Makes me long for the days at UM-A2 . . . Of course, I always complain about courseware, because however good it is, it's never as good as the Courseware in My Dreams. Nonetheless, in retrospect, those seem like higher-order, rich-kid whines. They're different from the bread-and-butter, keep-the-trains-running whines I now experience. And, as I always knew, it was such a gift back then to deal with people who just expected everything to work. And if things didn't work, I could call a human, who would fix the problem. Right now.

** sigh **

(And I understand that, in the user support arena, things at the U are not as good as they once were, either, so I ought to keep that in mind while I whine . . . )

Okay, this isn't getting those syllabi done either. Back to pencil and paper until the courseware comes back up . . .