The technology gremlins have attacked me several times over the past few months and I want to talk about them. (My examples are things that happened in Osher classes, because that’s where I teach; but as I make clear, none of this is the fault of either the Osher staff or me. It’s the technology gremlins.)
Everyone who teaches today knows the thrill of a good PowerPoint presentation. Everyone who teaches today also knows the sinking feeling when something goes wrong with the presentation.
When I retired from public school teaching in 2012, I was pretty proficient at PowerPoint, although not skills in the ins and outs of every trick that the program offers. I didn’t need all the tricks, and I didn’t have time to learn them and then incorporate them.
But since I’ve been teaching for the Osher program, I’ve had the opportunity to learn a lot more about the program. I can make slides do some pretty incredible things, if I do say so myself. But things don’t always work the way they should. The technology gremlins will catch you if you don’t watch out.
I am always pretty well prepared before I teach a class. I have made my slides, run them, tested the links and the animation, and all of that. But I have still been caught by the technology gremlins. Here are a few examples of what I mean:
Yesterday (March 20, 2023) I was ready to teach the first session of my new class on the Pinckney family of South Carolina. Ann (an Osher staff person) was there as usual to set things up and ensure everything worked. I was there with my thumb drive. We inserted my thumb drive into the USB port and opened my presentation. It opened flawlessly and I was ready to go. So Ann pressed “start” on the touch panel on the wall; this panel turns on the projector and lowers the screen so that my presentation is displayed in giant format up on the screen. Or let’s say that’s what it’s supposed to do. Yesterday, the touch panel – which has one job, to respond to touch – did nothing. No projector, no screen, nuttin’. So Ann called someone (she knew who to call), who said he would be over soon to perform something magical. “Soon” was about 10 minutes, which the class filled by continuing to chat comfortably with each other. “Someone” was able to fix it all in about a minutes, so we proceeded – albeit about 10 minutes later than scheduled.
About a month ago, I was setting up to teach another class in a different building. Once again, I did my part and Ann did her part. But this time, although the system came on as it was supposed to, the projector did not project. Once again, Ann called someone (a different someone), who came to the classroom, climbed on top of a desk, and fiddled with the projector on the ceiling. There was apparently a loose cable. He fixed the cable connection in just a few minutes and everything worked.
Last semester, I was teaching a genealogy class in yet another classroom space. This time, everything had worked well for the first two class sessions, and I was confidently setting up for the third session. I did my part, and Ann did her part. But no joy – we couldn’t get the projector to recognize the desktop computer system (the one that is hardwired into the network). Ann even went back to the Osher office (a short drive away) to get her own laptop in case that was the problem. Still no joy. So I decided to go on without my slides. As it turned out, this worked okay. I had already planned to use half the class session (one hour) for a kind of “show and tell” among the class members, and they had all come in bearing various scrapbooks, portraits, engravings, family bibles, and other artifacts they had collected as part of their research. We just extended what was going to be an hour to the full two hours of the class session, and it went fine. NOTE: This would not have been possible in any other Osher class I have ever taught. While the gremlins were attacking, the gods were smiling.
In previous years of teaching for Osher, I have not experienced this many problems. I think there are a few things going on. (There are probably more factors but I can’t think of them right now.)
The support staff that helps make all of these things happen – general College staff as well as in the Osher Program – is smaller than it used to be pre-Covid. All of the changes that Covid brought about are still resonating through HR departments all over the world. This means that routine maintenance and updating doesn’t happen as regularly as it once did, and component failures are thus more frequent. Locally, it also means that IT support, which used to reside in each building, is now spread among several buildings and for fewer hours. This means there is sometimes no response when you call the IT help number.
There is more stress on networks than there used to be. A greater reliance on virtual instruction and Zoom meetings uses up significantly more bandwidth than was the norm just a few years ago. Stressed systems fail more often.
Equipment is aging and approaching obsolescence. We have had the same equipment in most of these teaching spaces for more than five years, and the combination of technological advancements and normal wear and tear means that our current equipment is not always up to the job.
I’m highlighting this not to just make the point that technology issues present more pressing (and more frequent) problems than they did just a few years ago. I’m experiencing this as a (very) part-time, unpaid, volunteer instructor in a because-learning-is-fun program. I can only imagine that regular college staff experience similar problems – but they have less freedom to say “oh well, I guess we can’t have class this week.” Students have course requirements they need to meet to earn the degrees they seek, and they can’t really put things off because of technical gremlins.
Extrapolating this to the public schools – I literally cannot imagine the stress that our K-12 teachers experience on a daily basis, as the antiquated computer systems and networks in the schools try to support quality instruction in a virtual environment. Add to that the problems that their students have when they try to access the internet from home to access assignments and turn in homework, and you have the makings of a disaster. The documented decline in student learning over the past couple of years shows this. In many rural parts of the country, internet access is sporadic if it’s available at all. Sometimes a family only ones one laptop, which the kids in the family have to share to get their work done. When the schools issue Chromebooks to the kids, some kids treat them the way they treat anything they’re not responsible for.
The result is equipment failures. When things don’t work, students either ignore their assignments, saying “I couldn’t get online” or they do weird things to try to make things work, sometimes screwing things up even more. They then come into the classroom and tell the already overworked and frazzled teacher what happened – and the teacher has no way to verify what happened or to help the student figure out how to solve the problem. One local teacher told me recently that one of her students reported that his school-issued Chromebook went missing when his older brother (who was already out of school) took it and sold it.
The solution to this problem lies in money – but not just random money. We need money directed to the things that need to be done to allow teachers to do their jobs more effectively. The school boards and state legislatures need to stop the performative nonsense of banning books or drag queens or prohibiting CRT or supporting school vouchers or whatever the hell is the Outrage of the Month and do what needs to be done: provide the public schools with the resources they need to meet the needs of their students. No more, no less.
AMEN! I would so like an animation of the Technology Gremlins at work!
Would that our *governor* would read your column.