HACkers blog

One of the changes that has crept in in recent years has meant that we no longer teach students; we provide services to clients / customers, of which the education / training (depending on the Faculty) they receive in the classroom forms part. This isn't unique to our context - though we're probably unique in actively seeking to embrace it, having been shielded through apartheid isolation.

Of course, "rebranding" our students as customers has implications - consumer advocates, and Customer Service For Beginners marketers, smilingly insist that The Customer Is Always Right. The newspapers recently reported on the case of a PhD student who clearly lacked the remotest understanding of the external examination process to which all theses are subjected. The report conveyed the attitude of a disgruntled customer wishing to obtain a refund on a disappointing product - like the Sea Monkeys of the 1970, the reality simply didn't live up to the hype.

Of course, it takes the Americans to take this orientation to its logical conclusion. Not content with merely soliciting student feedback on courses for quality assurance purposes, they've spawned a myriad websites where Customers (fka Students) can post reviews on their Service Providers (fka lecturers), so that other Customers can shop around for the best deal. And, if that means the softest deal, then hey, why not? They're consumers, after all.

I referred elsewhere to the UCLA alumnus who profiled 31 "radical" academics, and was paying students to spy on their lecturers for similar exposure, but some of these other sites take things quite a bit further. It's open season on lecturers out there - and lecturers are increasingly having to choose between professional integrity (and some nod at maintaining "standards") and "customer satisfaction" - popularity with the students, which usually means inflating course marks and diluting requirements.

And before you roll your eyes and sigh, "Only in America"... you might care to visit Teacher Review.Com - they've moved their focus beyond North America and have now included universities elsewhere for reviews. Including our own. (There are currently no reviews posted, but that could all change overnight!)

Be afraid? Be very afraid!

It's the start of the year, and everybody is frantically busy. Well, aside from some rank-and-file academics stll on leave - those not teaching on Summer Term, Summer School, or other short courses; those not sitting on selection committees; those not squeezing in a bit of time on research; and those not trying to make sense out of a course description for a course they've inherited from departed colleagues. Campus is pretty busy.

And so, of course, tempers fray. And systems, invariably, fail.

Two days before pay day, a staff member found that his access card no longer worked. On querying it with Access Control, he was informed that he no longer worked here. Yep - somewhere between his HOD signing off the form that extended his contract, and him swiping his access card, The System had let him down, denying him access.

There are a number of postgraduate courses which make use of block teaching - the students come to Campus a couple of times a year for a couple of weeks of intense teaching, outside of which they work through material, produce assignments, and complete other coursework requirements, off Campus. Their time on Campus is scheduled down to the last microsecond, and the loss of time is simply unaffordable. And so, when a centrally rolled out system fails, denying an entire class access to a lab for an evening's scheduled - critical - teaching, the students, the teaching staff, the lab staff and the technical support staff all understandably become rather stressed. System failure, access denied.

And then, of course, we've embarked on a Big Thing, moving the entire student information system across to something new and unknown. The registration pilot threw up a few problems, which hopefully will be addressed, but a steady stream of students found their way to my door to ask where they can get their passwords for the new system. Previous passwords didn't work, no new passwords had been issued them, and they were unable to access the new system. This one, it turns out, was a communication problem - the accounts were locked, because of outstanding fees balances, but the error message did not reflect this and reported a password error. Again, a system failure, denying access.

In each case, it took a great deal of stress and shouting to get to the bottom of the problem, and - hopefully - to kick off a process of resolution (the lab access problem was "resolved" through bypassing the flakey system. Unprocedural, forbidden, but necessary to protect the integrity of the academic project - or what the managerialists like to call "core business". I've always been a fan of doing what it takes, rather than doing what is stipulated.).

In this country, we're used to systems denying access - Apartheid being the most classic example, but others like capitalism no less significant. But those systems were designed to restrict access; the systems under discussion here were designed to promote access (to the appropriate people) and access was denied through system failure. Which, I suppose, requires us to be a little more prescient, a little more vigilant, a little quicker in our response, and a lot less stressed!

Another day, another spam dump... But while I was cleaning out the masses of spam which had accumulated overnight, I became a little curious. What exactly _is_ Phentermine, and why do its illicit purveyors think we'd be so keen on an under-the-counter source?

 

Because I hadn't yet had my first cup of coffee, the online databases linked from the Library site seemed too circuitous, so I tried that other trusty - and instant - source of Absolute Truth - Google. Within the space it took for me to depress (gently) the Enter key, I had 7, 630, 000 hits. Popular stuff, this Phentermine.

 

Since I wasn't looking for absolute reliability, merely a clue as to what the stuff was - or claimed to be - I went with the first site listed, which informed me that:

 

• Phentermine is a sympathomimetic amine, which is similar to an amphetamine. It is also known as an "anorectic" or "anorexigenic" drug. Phentermine stimulates the central nervous system (nerves and brain), which increases your heart rate and blood pressure and decreases your appetite.

• Phentermine is used as a short-term supplement to diet and exercise in the treatment of obesity.

• Phentermine may also be used for purposes other than those listed in this medication guide.

 

Aha! I suspected its allure lay in the last bullet point - rather like the Nobese of old, Phentermine appeared to be a diet product that also produced a rush, in sufficient quantities. And, like Nobese, it was also said to be habit forming.

 

Its attraction as a spammable commodity was becoming clearer and clearer. Most people would have use for no more than one fake Rolex, and possible only one or two counterfeit degrees.... and a great many of the people receiving the spam would have no use at all for a penis enlargement. Compared to Phentermine, those products were just losers! Here was a product with a built in loyalty programme, whose consumers would become like family through their continued product interest. Phentermine was the spamming future!

 

And so, this morning, before my first cup of coffee, I took that little bit extra delight gently depressing the delete key, and watching the Phentermine spam dissipate like mist.

Two recent articles - both in The Guardian - drew my attention to the extent to which we take academic freedom for granted. The first concerned the recent defeat in the UK's House of Lords of the proposed legislation which would have criminalised "direct or indirect" encouragement of "terrorist" acts - which might include the inclusion in course materials or academic libraries of information ranging from political or social groupings deemed "terrorist" to certain chemical processes which could usefully be deployed for nefarious purposes. In the most delightful of ironies, universities lobbied politicians in opposition parties to vote against the proposed legislation. The political right, voting against repressive legislation which would have advanced a rightist agenda, in order to preserve academic freedom? Hmmm...

The second also concerned the so-called "War on Terror". An alumnus of UCLA has set up a website urging students to shop the lecturers they consider "too radical" in their anti-Bush / anti-war views. It contains profiles of 31 members of the teaching staff in Social Science / Humanities disciplines whose politics has fallen foul of the web owner - for reasons as divergent as lesbianism, marxism, anti-Zionism and opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Students are offered money for providing evidence - from course materials to tapes of lectures - of "radical" views espoused and communicated by their lecturers. (While comparisons with McCarthyism and the Inquisition are inevitable, it also invokes shades of our own inglorious past, where students were regularly recruited by the Special Branch to spy on their lecturers.) What I found particularly interesting was that the University response seemed - at least according to the article - to be centred around whether or not the sale of course materials contravened copyright, rather than on the defamatory aspect of the website. A visit to the website immediately made it all clear - the profiles, while no doubt intended as defamatory, are unlikely to harm the reputation of those profiled. Though they may well cast doubt on the value of a UCLA degree, written (as they are assumed to be) by a UCLA graduate.

As most people know, one of my research interests involves studying online or virtual communities. Hanging out in virtual communities inevitably results in a formidable collection of virtual friends. Sometimes, and this is related to one of the CSFs of virtual communities, these virtual communities establish offline connections too. And sometimes what's "real" and what's "virtual" ceases to be quite so easy to distinguish.

Recently, word got out - through a "virtual" connection who also happens to be a very real student - that I was going to be dragged into a spot of teaching in the department in which she will be studying. On blogging. Within as long as it takes to jam all availabe bandwidth from here to Baghdad, the message was out. Random members of a virtual community were plotting to dress up, board the Jammie Shuttle, and gatecrash my classes. Virtual personae were threatening to storm the fortresses of the "real" world.

I'm not sure I've fully comprehended quite how many levels have been sucked into this vortex, but I *definitely* feel like I am being spoken by the discourse...

Our beautiful new, currently nameless, lab boasts a rather unusual colour scheme. At least, unusual for UCT. It has a fresh, spring green accent wall, and a black carpet. The art student that I was 20 years ago finds this very satisfying. My outgoing line manager, less so. He's more of a burgundy man.

Recently Leslie Commerce Annex (formerly known as Leslie Social Science) was daubed in baby blue - at least, levels four and five (and possibly by now, level six) - and recarpeted. The baby blue, while semiotically uncomfortable, was at least better than the non-colour that was on the walls before - no doubt chosen to match the shaki carpets.

And then, across in Arts, the gleaming new Film and Media tea room boasts battleship grey and sea scum on its walls, grey couches, anti-colour carpets and even grey painted light switches. Recently a few whispers of colour were added through a cushion here and there, and some coffee cups.

Colour seems to be an issue. It's institutional blue, or nothing, in many places. Almost as if colour, like personality, is best left at home. Potentially disruptive, anarchic, individual. The unspoken uniform.

My own office walls, for the record, are the softest shade of asylum pink...

The advantage of not having a dress code is that every day, you can wear (depending on the options within your wardrobe) just what you feel like wearing. The disadvantage is that everyone else does, too.

And then, occasionally, someone will dress out of character. A formal type will appear in shorts, a relaxed dresser will don a power suit. And while the former usually just draws some interested glances, the latter puts the grapevine into overdrive. Speculation about interviews, or more interestingly trying to catch the eye of a romantic target, or some kind of negative attention, abounds. If it's "none of the above", the person often feels discouraged by all the attention, and reverts to type. All the compliments have an inhibiting, rather than reinforcing, effect.

This creates problems for people who *are* planning to slip out for an interview. Do they bring along interview clothes, and slip into the cloakroom of another neutral building, on the way, to change? Do they wear their interview clothes to work, and deal with the speculation? Or... do they work up to it in the days before the interview, dressing more formally every day with excuses like "the washing machine is in for repairs and this is all I'm left with that's clean"?

Still, neat semiotic shorthand gets completely disrupted when one walks into the women's cloakroom to find... nakedness! Even the flexibility to choose one's outfit for the day doesn't preclude the weather ruling that it's not appropriate, it seems...

As part of the multilingualism drive, some buildings are being targeted as pilot sites for trilingual signage. The pilot sites are intended to be "high impact" - though I'm not sure if this is being defined in terms of volume, or symbolic value.

Suggested are Kramer, the Steve Biko Building and Bremner. Conspicuously absent is the Library. I'd have thought that in terms both of volume and symbolic value, the Library should be up there. All students, and most staff, have reason to traipse in and out of the Library frequently, accounting for high volume; and, as the very heart of the academic enterprise, it surely carries more symbolic weight than Bremner - or, should?

Quite aside from it being a *library*, home of the written word - which is, surely, what signage is?

Those of us who've been here long enough are used to change being cyclical. "Wait long enough," conventional wisdom goes, "and things will return to how they once were!" Numerous examples get wheeled out in support of this assertion, from the quiet scrapping of Programmes to the uncoupling of Communication and Development, the return of Education to the Old Education Building and the re-insourcing of what was then Humanities IT. There is currently muttering on the other side of the Bremner moat about whether "devolution" has "gone too far", even.

In most cases, the original Change was high profile, trumpeted and feted, ushered in at great expense and the sour mutterings of the nay-sayers brushed aside as reactionary or worse. In almost all cases, the subsequent reversal happens altogether more quietly, through the back door almost, and the "I told you so's" of the nay-sayers brushed aside as Schadenfreude.

Recently, mention was made of the hand dryers in the toilets. Gleaming brightly, these continue to adorn the walls. But alongside them have appeared packs of Kimdri hand towels - whose popularity can bet read from the vast amounts of used ones to be found in the bins by the door. An admission of the inadequacy of the hand dryers? Perhaps. (As is, perhaps, the hand towels hanging in some staff offices?)

But the best reversal of late simply *has* to be the removal of that dreadful bird squawker at the coffee outlet in Leslie. I'm sure the impact on productivity is already significant!

 (More)

Campus is currently a ghost town. The floors gleam. Noticeboards are tidy. There are no queues at the ATM or the chocolate machine. The Library is like a vast, cavernous womb. Only birds are to be found in Leslie. And there is plenty of parking, even on University Avenue.

The five people on Campus phone each other regularly, to check if someone has perhaps strayed across a source of something-more-substantial-than-chocolate (yes - University Avenue North, in the scary Science part of the universe) or an open coffee outlet (sadly, not yet...) but mostly to check that they're not entirely alone... like a Bob Dylan song, or those 1970s Christian movies where everyone gets raptured except some poor misguided soul who's left... alone...

It's a time for repotting office plants, tidying email folders and editing conference papers. For typing those useful references into Citation, those important contact details into your cellphone, the missing artists' names into iTunes. But mostly, it's a time for reading. For finding out what's been happening in the world, in the country, in the discipline, while we were busy working. It's a time to reconnect with Why We're Here. Even if everyone else is elsewhere.

2005 was not the best of years to work at UCT. Statistically, one's chances of dying traumatically escalated considerably, and a thick fog of negative energy seemed to hover over the Campus.

As the year waned, the spam attacks on our blogspot escalated - though, it must be noted, even the spammers took New Year off for some partying before resuming the next day.

Let's hope 2006 is better and brighter. Happy New Year everyone!