I took an unaccustomed walk just now, down University Avenue, under a canopy of leaves that surely didn't exist when I first used to do the same promenade. To a Union that no longer exists, from a building then new, now over 30 years old...past frontages that are very changed, with strange statuary in front of them; ending up in front of a Jammie Hall that is - changeless. And nearly stepping in a strange little water feature that seems to exist to collect leaves, but that is by the by. Looking up at Jammie, and then down at almost-out-of-his-chair-on-sighting-a-virgin Cecil JR, one could believe that more than a third of a century had not passed; that one might still see a poster advertising the movie "And Now For Something Completely Different", again; that students with longer male hair and bell bottoms would soon hove into view.
I wasn't going out for nostalgia; in fact, I was looking for a cup of decent coffee to keep me awake while I grimly plough through the crap on my computer that keeps me from actually working on anything publicationally subsidisable (OK, yes, sorry, we have generator power...B-). But there I went, and here we are: nostalgising. All too soon, however, you realise the past is a different country, and sometimes the visit's not worth it.
Anyone else ever smoke other-than-tobacco-cigarettes in the bushes behind Jammie? No bushes there now...but I remember vividly skulking back there, waiting for a Dollar Brand concert to start back in 1975 so we could slip in the side door. The man's still playing, but not like in the Dollar days, and not with Basil Coetzee. Probably a lot riskier to smoke herbs, too.
Go hunting guinea fowl in the field opposite Belsen with a baseball bat? No field there now, and anyway, Belsen's Kopano...despite the fact that former residents voted clearly in favour of retaining Driekoppen. One wonders why anyone bothered to ask. I suppose you could use your car, now, given at least the guinea fowl are still around on Ring Road, but the thrill has gone (we never actually caught one, BTW).
Listen to the "Voice of Aquarius"? Live, in all (3?) Unions - with your 10-cent coffee and 80-cent spaghetti bolognese? Watching the serious bridge players (yes, Hugh, once you as well)? Not that I dislike the new dispersed catering model; having a choice of three different vendors right outside our building is heaven, compared to the old dash through the rain to queue in the Union. And life's too short for bad coffee, and there are a number of good places to indulge these days. My office for one - it's amazing what research funds can buy...B-)
Watch mad folk on shower boards ride down Jammie steps, shedding kneecaps and fingers as they flew? Banned these many years, but hold! Was that a mountain bike I saw, slaloming down from the hall towards Cecil? Yes, it was: mad bugger. Hope the Group 4 security catch him.
Be all as it may, it gets increasingly hard to relate how things were to the way things are: there are three times as many people on campus these days compared to 1974; our village has become a town - with all of the crass commercialisation and homogenisation that entails.
Not that I think we are now serving up plastic degrees, and you want a diploma with that? Heavens and other locations forbid! I just think we may be doing it with plastic utensils, without looking the customers in the eye.
Ah, me. So it's back to looking at the ugly building across the road - 27 years, and it's still there, blocking the view - pondering fresh and interesting ways to serve up what increasingly feels like the same-old, same-old. Mind you, my gloomy long-time colleague and current HoD muttered darkly not two hours ago, that "we'll all have to go back to chalk-and-talk at this rate, until 2013!". So the past has not gone: the village comes back to the town; once again we shall sit again under the shade of trees, and dispense knowledge in the open.
FTFAGOS* - I shall stick resolutely with my painstakingly-over-years digitised teaching material, refer the students to the Web and to texts, and pitch up like an Oxford or Cambridge don to hold tutorials. A dream come true! I may yet enjoy this year...B-)
* = forget that for a game of soldiers.
My, how things do change...I found myself reflecting, while I was looking over the detritus on our Web server of some 13 years of posting pages on the Web. "Orphan" pages, unconnected to anything current; pages with a majority of dead links, because they are so old; pages last updated in 2000; pages left behind by the inexorable onward flow of the river that is the W3; pages carried forward through several incarnations of the server.... And yet, not to be deleted by the careless press of a key, because there is a sort of history there that is very hard to chronicle. A history of how the Kikwit Ebola outbreak unfolded in 1995, for example, post by email post. An account of how an Honours student inadvertently became the Web's only Ebola expert, for a brief while in 1995...ah, what passing pleasures, now mainly gone. Consider this: a connected set of Web pages is a network, existing as a linked series of snapshots that reflect the current update. Every single change alters the network - yet where is this recorded? If you are lucky and have a hard drive the size of the Empire State Building, or if you are disciplined enough to actually back things up as successive versions, then perhaps you have an accurate historical record of how things changed - but no-one else will. And given the fact that most normal people are not disciplined enough to do the necessary, you probably don't either....
So how does one even approach the problem of constructing a history of any particular corpus of Web-published material? We are confronted with a situation not dissimilar to the one which confronts would-be chroniclers of any ordinary human life: the only material available for research is the latest version (if still extant), and a mess of isolated snapshots and pages, if we are lucky.
I took a look back over my teaching material the other day, which I started formulating back in mid-1994, round about the time the Web came into existence for us non-professionals. I don't have a single file dating back to that time, not one: the only thing left is a grandfathered filename (virtut1.html) that it would be too complicated to change. The earliest I can get back to - on a dusty CD-ROM backup unearthed from a bottom drawer, from a PC I gave away at least three upgrades ago - is 1998, and then only for some of the files I actually updated at the time. My first Web pages are thus irretrievably gone, vanished into entropy - unless they are fossilised on some long-lived legal or illegal mirror server somewhere, like some of my outdated pages I found quite by accident on a computer in Cambridge, and only got removed by threat of copyright infringement action.
So why bother at all? Of what interest is the history of some half-baked, amateurish attempts at porting teaching material from overhead projection transparencies to the Web?
Weeeeeelllll...it's not really for me to say, is it? I can't predict who might be interested in the historiography of virology pedagogics - but it's just a little sad to think that so much work has vanished into free electrons, wandering the universe until the inevitable heat death stills them all. I mean, look at my Virology course textbook: this now in a third edition, and all three are available to anyone who wishes to compare them. I can't even find Versions 1 - n-1 of my material, so all you're left with is Version n, of 2007. It's paradoxical that in this electronic age, it's still the traditional medium of print that still has the best potential for survival. I may even still have some of my original hand-printed overheads from 1981, if they survived the last office-cleaning purge!
But be that as it may...my continuous rolling upgrade of the Web pages has reached a 2006 version in most cases, and 2007 in a few - with a lot of visual material still stuck in a dark age. There is actually not that much incentive to do too much about that, frankly, given the wealth of graphics now out there in Webspace: but nearly everything is copyrighted, so putting it up on my site could be courting prosecution. Which is why linking to things via the Web is the way to go...if I only had time!! Aaaaarrrgghhh!!!
So I dream...of no orphan pages; no lost links...and a daily backup, so that a complete history is available to some future Webnaut, somewhere out there. Rock on.
Ed Rybicki
Cape Town, June 7th 2007
Comrades in the educational struggle: I hope you are over your solstice festival and calendar-change celebrations and are gearing up for the oncoming battles? Good! Then I have something of interest for some of you: I have just had an email from a group at the University of Newcastle in Oz about a survey they are conducting.
"I am an infectious disease scientist and in collaboration with religious and psychology academics at the University of Newcastle I am conducting an international internet-based survey on creation vs evolution to determine current perspectives in this 'debate'. It is a short survey. We would greatly appreciate if you would consider reading the information statement and completing the survey accessible at:
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/school/hss/disciplines/survey.html
It is important that all relevant groups are represented in the responses of this survey. Thank you for considering this invitation. Sorry to disturb you with this email if you are not interested. If you are willing, please feel free to pass this on to your colleagues.
David P Wilson
<David.P.Wilson@studentmail.newcastle.edu.au>"
All relevant groups would be those of you involved in education / educating educators / formulating educational policy / philosophers / humanists / anyone, really.
Forward to a secular evolutionary education policy...!
