HACkers blog

So now that it's official, and I'm set to leave these echoing corridors, the lists are starting to form in my mind:

Things I will miss about UCT:

1.  The Library. Yes yes yes the librarians are not that scary actually, and once you sneak past Jean with a paper bag over your head so that she can't arrest you for outstanding fines, you're pretty safe unless you have a hideous ringtone. In which case you deserve to die and they're only exercising their global mandate. 

 Things I will not miss about UCT:

1. Falling off the internet every 30 seconds. Assuming ISA lets you climb on in the first place. (Using Firefox? How dare you! Certainly not!)
   

I encountered Nicholson Baker via The Mezzanine, although more press coverage was given to Vox, the phone sex novel - thanks to The Other Clinton. (It was the book Monica had given him, which he lied about reading, gripping the nation.) As a lover of footnotes, I find his writing immensely engaging, but it's been a while since I've had the capacity to read much of anything, and so he had largely faded into that part of my memory reserved for Trivial Pursuit and Hangman Tournament.

And then I encountered - courtesy of The Guardian -  his discussion of how he fell in love with Wikipedia. Those of us who teach, research or even just play with Web2.0 tools will recognise the fun, addictive element he describes. And those who don't (yet) might just be tempted to try...

Poised on the cusp of Next Steps, my mind is compelled to reflect back on how much, and how little, has changed.  

Fifteen and a half years ago, almost to the day, I was employed at UCT to pilot a computer-aided learning project aimed at providing additional educational resources for students on the then-MEDASP extended curriculum stream at Medical School. A mere Teaching Assistant, on a hand-to-mouth contract (whose terms would be illegal under the BCEA), I started out in those early days of Microsoft Windows using authoring software like Toolbook, Guide, HyperCASE and (later) Quest, cobbled together with DOS batch files and pieces of string. There was no Web. The Internet, back then, was mostly Usenet, the email was Pegasus for DOS, and Windows Sockets and FTP and Gopher were terms with meaning.  

Somewhere along the way, the Web happened. And happened again - Web 2.0 snuck up on educators whose core was shaken by the notion of user-generated content, the wresting of power and Knowledge from experts and the right - and expectation - of learners to answer back. We've come a long way, right? Right??

Reading Gillion's blog on the Extended Degree Programme couldn't help but remind me of Nimrod's letter to Varsity all those years back, raising similar issues about MEDASP. Viewing Retroid's caution about Vuisboek reminded me of the baby vs bathwater skepticism around the use of Toolbook tutorials back in the early 90s. Every step resounds with echoes from the past. It's hard to believe it's been fifteen and a half years. 

Although, back then, we had an email system that worked.... Pegasus for DOS, anyone?