Hey, you gotta love ICTS: they define the definition of insanity (while doing good work), by doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result...I refer, of course, to the never-ending and fruitless endeavour that is fixing GroupSTUPID!!! The latest offering:
Dear UCT staff and students,
We require a period of unscheduled maintenance time on the UCT GWIA, a part of the UCT email system that affects IMAP users and the external delivery of mail.
Reason for the maintenance:
Troubleshooting an issue regarding the UCT email Disclaimer.
Date & Time:
Intermittent unavailability for the period: Tuesday 16 March, 17h00 - 19h00.
Affected services or groups:
Intermittent unavailability for IMAP users and interruptions to external mail delivery.
We will post a message to the ICTS website System and Service Announcements pane as soon as the maintenance is complete.
Regards,
ICTS Communications
So...outgoing mail will be affected...because of the UCT email disclaimer?? Really?? A simple solution, folks: DON'T USE GROUPSTUPID. Ah, Gmail, thy virtues are plain to see.... And see here, for an earlier offering on how silly the disclaimer / datclaimer is.
I'm off to read my Gmail. Which - thanks to ICTS and submarine cables - really works well.
Mail from ICTS on Friday 5th:
Dear UCT staff and students,
Daylight Saving Time (DST) is the system of setting clocks one or two hours ahead of standard time so that sunrise and sunset occur at a later hour, thus artificially moving a period of daylight to the evening hours. South Africa does not use this system and the DST setting is centrally de-activated on the GroupWise server at UCT.
This deactivation of DST did not flow down to all GroupWise users [! how surprising! - Ret.] and as a result some people’s calendars will switch to DST at the end of March. If you are affected, a once-off configuration change is required.
Enough said.Hands down. Really: it is the most frustrating, clunky piece of sh1t I have ever had to deal with to get email - and I go back to the days of logging in via DOS to UCTVAX and UCTHPX!!
The latest insult is this - which I get after a banner which says my mailbox is corrupted, and needs to be rebuilt, and that this may take a few minutes:
It has been saying that for 30 minutes....
I have had enough. I am already in the cloud (yes, looked at from both sides now, thank you B-), I have my Gmail account (retroid.raving@gmail.com, seeing as you asked - thanks, Vernon!), I have imported all my addresses and I autoforward my mail. Frak Gwise. FOREVER!!!!!
Graeme Bloch, that is - not the Retroid Kollectiv; they're just older.
But we do not mean to be elliptical (or pre-postmodern, or derridist, or other synonym for obscure): we refer to a UCT Daily News item, wherein said educationist bemoans, yet is not too depressed by, the state of SA schooling.
But to digress: if one delves into the Dark Past, one (of the Kollectiv) remembers a much younger Graeme, with longer and darker hair and a fine beard and a forbidding demeanour for those of us not Committed to the Struggle, shrilly announcing to all who would listen, up on the roof on Condom Heights Leo Marquard Hall that dark night (there was a blackout over most of Cape Town) in June 1976, "They're coming! They're coming!", as the fires started out on the Flats. "They" didn't, as it happened, and the lights came back on, and rain and the Fire Brigade put the fires out, and life went on.
But as we said, he is now much wiser. And older. And into education. And has a book on the subject. And lectures on it, publicly.
"It's going to take a concerted effort from many - teachers, government, society - to tackle the problems, he cautioned. "Given the complexity of education... it really is going to be called on all of us to get active."
Yes, well: ever since the bulk of the Kollectiv came to these fair shores in the mid-1970s, it has been obvious to us that the SA educational system was seriously flawed: kids were taught to rote-learn rather than to understand, the currciculum was simplistic and archaic compared to the then Rhodesian system used next door - and teachers seemed to be badly educated. And that was the white school system....
Things have improved since then, from an end-user perspective (hey, we teach!) - but the poorer / wealthier schools divide is still obvious, with the former products being far more prone to falling back on memorisation, and really struggling with simple concepts that have obviously never been taught properly.
So yes, we do all have to become active: and how better than by using the Open Education Resource paradigm, and trying to get poorer learners into using it? We have our eyes on the Biology syllabus....
