Thinking it Through

WTF: Technology Edition

I'm teaching 2 online sections of FYC for the first summer session. And teaching online means using BlackBoard (unless you're versed in some open software LMS, which I am not). I've never been a fan of BlackBoard; it's not really designed for writing courses, it's the most unstable software suite I have ever had to work with, and it's not at all intuitive. That's especially true of version 9, which my university in all its vast wisdom launched 6 days before the beginning of summer classes. Sure, they'd run a pilot of the program, but there were only 9 courses or 9 instructors (can't remember which) in that pilot.

Now we're at the end of the second week of the first summer session, and more often than not, BB has been down or parts of it inaccessible. So in a 5-week course as fast paced as it is compact, too much of our time has been spent dealing with BlackBoard troubles.

Here's the current system health report--it hasn't  changed since yesterday afternoon:

Now, I've been teaching this course the past few summers, so I have the pace and materials pretty much set, and that means most of the work now is reading and responding to student work and the avalanche of email that fills my in box each day. Most of the email I receive is asking questions about information I have painstakingly detailed in various places, but I digress.

These outages have not only been frustrating, but they have also screwed-up my course plans. And in a 5 - week course, there is very little if any time to revamp. Take yesterday for example. My students posted their first papers by 9:00 pm on Thursday. I was planning to grade them yesterday and today, but instead I spent an hour on the phone with the help desk only to have the case referred to the folks at BlackBoard. The problem is this: I cannot access the grade book which is where I have to go to download their papers. The grade book won't load in Firefox; it will load using Safari, but clicking on download the files to retrieve papers results in a 404--information cannot be found--error message.

So, what the hell am I to do? I need to get these papers graded and back to students so they have some indication how they did, and they need this before their second paper is due, which, by the way, is this coming Friday.


And so it goes.

Footage BP Doesn't Want Us to See

I am so angry and so overwhelmed by the devastation in the Gulf that I cannot find anything coherent to say. BP is doing everything in its power to prevent us from seeing what's going on in the waters of the Gulf and on the shorelines of Louisiana, Alabama Mississippi, and Florida. They've established No Fly Zones and are keeping researches away from the area. There are dead animals--primarily birds, but also Turtles, fish, dolphins--in and out of the water, and now we know the oil is likely to spread over the Atlantic.

Lives, livelihood, habitats, ecosystems, and the like are being destroyed, and the destroyers don't want us to see the devastating results of their greed.

Voices of Reason and Support for Diversity Prevail

Yesterday I wrote about a mural on the wall of a local Prescott, AZ school--Miller Valley Middle School--featuring the "portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure" had been the focus of much racist discourse and was being altered to make the faces on the mural appear caucasian.

Well, I am pleased to report, today, that the principal of Miller Valley Middle School, Jeff Lane, and the Superintendent Kevin Kapp admitted "they made a mistake and apologized for their decision to lighten children's faces on the mural"; they told a boisterous crowd that the mural would be returned to its original form that honors the diversity of the students at the school.

Let's hear it for the protester who spoke out against Miller's decision and who stood for diversity over hate:

I am so pleased to be able to write about something good happening in Arizona.

Could this be the beginning of more protests against the racists who have crawled out from under their rocks to spew their hate? Doc aptly identifies them as cockroaches. Maybe this is the beginning of their extermination.

One can always hope, and this story gives me the opportunity to do just that.

Thanks you Prescott protesters.

Prescott, AZ: Racists Freak Over School Mural

Today, Wonkette directed my attention to a most disturbing story in the Arizona Republic. A mural on the wall of a local Prescott, AZ school--Miller Valley Middle School--featuring the "portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure has been the focus of much racist discourse and is now being altered to make the faces on the mural appear caucasian.

Much of this hate has been ginned up by Steve Blair, a Prescott City Councilman and local radio talk show host. The AZ Republic quotes Blair as having said the following during one of his broadcasts:

"To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?"

Blair had mistaken the middle portrait of a Latino child to be that of an African-American boy, but that's not the point. He's a hateful racist bastard. Although he refused to comment on the issue when asked to by the AZ Republic, they located the following in the archives of his programs:

"Personally, I think it's pathetic," he says of the portrait. "You have changed the ambience of that building to excite some kind of diversity power struggle that doesn't exist in Prescott, Arizona. And I'm ashamed of that."

Well Steve, you certainly ought to be ashamed . . .ashamed of yourself and all the others who harrassed the artists while they were painting the mural. As one of the artists noted,

"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics)."

I don't think I can say it any better than Wonkette:

Hard to find even the Gallows Humor in this story, so maybe we won’t even try. Maybe it’s time to admit that large chunks of America are in the hands of unreconstructed racists and vulgar idiots, and that the popular election of a black man as president just might’ve pushed these furious, economically doomed old white people into a final rage that is going to end very, very badly.

She continues:

Remember where you were, when you could still laugh about teabaggers and racists and Arizonans, because funny time is almost over. If the unemployment keeps up — one in five adult white males has no job and will never have a job again — and people keep walking away from their stucco heaps they can’t afford and the states and cities and counties and towns keep passing their aggressive racist laws to rile up the trash even more, shit’s going to very soon become very bad, and whether it’s the National Guard having wars in the Sunbelt Exurbs against armies of crazy old white people who are finally using their hundreds of millions of guns, or whole Latino neighborhoods burned to the ground the way the Klan used to burn down black neighborhoods a century ago, we are in for a long dark night and no light-colored paint is going to fix that.

Amen, sister.