Those less fortunate among us are, on occasion, forcibly sent to a distant (and somewhat two-dimensional) realm of existence to undertake grueling mental labour: the marking of student submissions.
I have mapped this land from what little remains of my mind after many hours crossing its ragged terrain, with naught but a red pen and enormous supplies of chocolate.
As you might have realised, I work at Curtin University, formerly Curtin University of Technology (CUT), formerly – though conceivably somewhat apocryphally – Curtin University of New Technology (CU*T), formerly the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT), formerly Perth Technical College, formerly Perth Technical School, formerly – and definitely more apocryphally – the New Holland Colonial Blacksmith and Breakfast Bar, formerly the East Gondwana School of Blunt Instruments.
We’re not good at names.
One of the most frustrating aspects of this particular institutional blight is how it plays out in the University’s ICT services. There are those who must spend long dark hours of their lives dreaming up grandiose names with which to inspire the huddled masses to come forth and be dazzled by yet another online service. The problem is that we have hundreds of such services, and it’s an act of cognitive warfare to suggest that we should memorise that many bizarre acronyms and cute but hideously overly-generic terms and the circumstances in which they must be applied. Without wishing to blame anyone in particular, it’s all getting a bit ridiculous.
You can see how and why it happens. The University’s ICT infrastructure has grown organically, bits and pieces being added over time with no real coordination. This is probably inevitable in a large, diverse organisation. The plethora of different ICT services resemble a market, with each different product competing for mind share. However, it’s not a market, and in theory we’re supposed to use all of the relevant services. So, when a new service is added or updated, it suddenly becomes Very Important that everyone bow down before the mighty ingenuity involved, and recognise the sudden urgency with which the new technology must be adopted. The next service to be added or updated after that requires the same thing, and so on. To make it happen, each of these new services can’t just be named – they must be branded. ICT services are not just provided at Curtin – they are, in the marketing sense, sold.
Several years ago, University management commissioned the “OASIS” website, with the aim of integrating all the disparate online services (and introducing our beloved Official Communication Channel). OASIS originally stood stands for “Online Access to Student Information Service” (a backronym, one presumes). Now, however, it doesn’t seem to stand for anything. It’s just a meaningless name, and thus is itself a perfect example of the problem at work.
OASIS was originally marketted as the “One Site to Rule Them All”, which it sort of is, but only at a very superficial level. There’s a lot of delegation involved, and the “ruling them all” bit only goes as far as logging in. Once you’re logged in, you still need to navigate a maze of services that are still essentially separate niche applications. The fact that these are not fully integrated, functionally and stylistically, is not the first problem. The first problem is what they’re all called.
Names of these services include “eVALUate”, “StudentOne”, “eStudent”, and “eAcademic”, among others. My point is perhaps more easily grasped by an outsider, for whom these names must seem rather useless as descriptions of what the systems actually do. Indeed they are – eVALUuate has nothing to do with grading or student results, StudentOne is inaccessible to students, eStudent provides nothing that students will find useful on a regular basis, and eAcademic is actually used to access student information. (The true functions of these systems are, of course, better understood by Curtin staff and students than by outsiders, but only by being forced to use them.)
Now, there are many ways in which these services might be better integrated, but a not-insignificant amount of confusion and cognitive waste could be alleviated simply by coming up with names that actually make sense. By this, I mean intuitively obvious, not requiring large-scale internal marketing programs. The ICT branding we have at the moment is a complete waste of resources at every level. In my ever-humble opinion, all these services should have purely functional names. They should not stand out. They should not be cute, or cool, or inspiring, or grandiose. They should be simple, accurate, no-nonsense descriptions of the services provided. For instance:
At least, that gives you some idea.
I don’t know how the mind of a marketing person might react to this. I’d hope that a good marketing person might recognise the merits of functional naming as a means of encouraging the use of ICT services.
I do respect fire drills. Honestly, I do. However, when the alarm started sounding at around 11:30 this morning I happened to be naked, wet and soapy, as a result (fortunately) of being in the shower. I was fairly certain it was a drill because I’d seen another drill earlier in the morning for the building next to us.
I actually managed to finish up and get dressed just as the fire warden began hammering on the door. I inquired what one is supposed to do in such situations. He dismissed me and said simply that he didn’t care whether I was naked and wet. He just wanted me outside in the muster area with everyone else. And it’s true – this individual (who happens to be one of our senior lecturers) really wouldn’t care. However, I suspect I’m not be alone in feeling that if I’m going to be running outside dressed in nothing but a towel and shampoo suds, it had better damn well be a real emergency.
An “official communication” from early June demanded that all Engineering and Computing postgraduate students take part in the Curtin Engineering & Computing Research Colloquium. Those who didn’t might be placed on “conditional status”, the message warned.
A slightly rebellious instinct led me to think of ways to obey the letter but not the spirit of this new requirement. Particularly, the fact that previous colloquiums have been published online introduced some interesting possibilities:
In the end I yielded, and on the day (August 25) I gave a reasonably serious and possibly even somewhat comprehensible talk on a controlled experiment I’d conducted on defect detection in software inspections.
A while afterwards, I received in the mail a certificate of participation, certifying that I had indeed given the talk I had given. It felt a little awkward. Giving a 15 minute talk isn’t something I’d have thought deserving of a certificate. It might be useful for proving that I’ve done it, since it now appears to be a course requirement, but a simple note would have sufficed.
Interestingly, I later received another certificate, identical except that my thesis title had been substituted for the actual title of my talk. In essence, I now have a piece of paper, signed personally by the Dean of Engineering, certifying that I’ve given a talk that never happened.
I found this somewhat random piece of work (sung to the tune of Bette Midler’s From A Distance) while digging through my hard drive. I did have to change “John” to “Rudd” though.
From a distance the campus looks green and orange,
and the concrete buildings grey.
From a distance OASIS meets the screen,
and the grant cash has been paid.
From a distance, there is harmony,
and it echoes through the labs.
It’s advice of hope, it’s advice of peace,
lecture notes in browser tabs.
From a distance we all have enough,
and no one hates the dean.
And there are no scales, no fails, and sound degrees,
no paying customers to please.
From a distance we are researchers
writing worldly documents.
Giving talks on hope, giving talks on peace,
They’re the talks of common sense.
Rudd is watching us. Rudd is watching us.
Rudd is watching us from a distance.
From a distance you look like my friend,
though you’ve plagarised before.
From a distance I just cannot comprehend
what all these meetings are for.
From a distance there is harmony,
and it echoes through the labs.
And it’s the test of hope, it’s the test of love,
it’s the students’ study plan.
It’s the hope of hopes, it’s the love of loves.
They are all basically human.
And Rudd is watching us, Rudd is watching us,
Rudd is watching us from a distance.
Oh, Rudd is watching us, Rudd is watching.
Rudd is watching us from a distance.
The ATO’s tax bonus eligibility calculator informs me that I’m not, after all, eligible to receive the $900 tax bonus. I was above the tax-free threshold in 2007-08, but my tax was erased by offsets. It’s not clear whether I’m eligible to receive the $950 “training and learning” bonus either. I’m unknown to Centrelink and I’m not receiving a scholarship, but the Council for Australian Postgraduate Associations is apparently “confident that administrative measures included in the package will mean that no other students are left out.”
Jolly good then. I have no idea what these “administrative measures” are, but I’m sure I’ll find out eventually, for better or worse.
On a philosophical note, it’s tough to decide whether I should be upset (hypothetically) about not being stimulated. We would rightfully complain if the needy were to miss out on welfare. In general, it’s natural to complain about not being afforded the same benefits as those around us. However, this isn’t really about wealth redistribution – it’s just a mechanism to get money circulating again – a once-off event. It’s also not as if I’m going to be any worse off, whatever the outcome. However, that 75kg of chocolate may have to wait.
Here’s what diversity means to a university tutor.
Student A appears with a deer-in-the-headlights look at the door to the senior tutor room and asks (in a bewildering tone that sounds as if a layer of righteous outrage has been suppressed and petrified beneath another layer of sheer blinding terror) if there is going to be a tutorial now for the unit that I tutor. I stumble through an explanation of the weekly tutorial times – there are only two, and neither of them are now – and leave him with a look of deep suspicion and confusion. This is half-way through semester.
Student B appears at the door to the senior tutor room with a demeanour that could very well be those transfixing headlights. She doesn’t have a question – she’s just bored. She bounds over to see what I’m doing and recoils at the tutorial exercise I’m preparing to give in an hour. Nevertheless, I begin to explain it and within a minute she rips the paper out of my hand and sits down to undertake the exercise: disassembling a Java class file by hand. She isn’t even enrolled in the unit, and won’t be for another year.
All Curtin students and staff know about OASIS.
OASIS purportedly stands for “Online Access to Student Information Service” . Is that the best they could do, you ask? Evidentially, that full name is now such an embarrassment that it doesn’t seem to appear anywhere on the official OASIS website. However, I’m still not sure which is sillier – the full title, the abbreviation (a transparent backronym), or the slogan bestowed upon us when it first launched: “One site to rule them all”.
It’s bigger than Jesus!
The centrepiece of OASIS is the OCC (Official Communication Channel), through which students receive official correspondence from the University. Replacing physical mail with electronic mail is commendable, but OCC has two small drawbacks. One is that you can’t choose to receive OCC messages via email, or even to receive email notifications. You must remember to log in to OASIS. The other is best illustrated in the following pie chart, representing all the messages (now archived) I’ve received:
In the past 27 months, I’ve received 21 useful messages: about 0.18 per week. I realise that at some level the University is obliged to send me the other messages as well, but that’s not the point. Logging into OASIS isn’t hard, but you quickly forget because it’s usually such a fruitless exercise. According to the official policy, one “performance indicator” for the OCC is: “The percentage of students with active OASIS accounts that access their official correspondence at least once per week.” They’re not advertising this metric, of course.
It’s not until a library book is recalled (whether you’re the original borrower or the recaller) that you appreciate the true splendour of the OCC. I simply didn’t know about mine until after fines had already started accumulating, and the person who’d recalled the book probably wasn’t too happy about it either. With email, I’d have returned the book the same day.
Not to be entirely defeated, however, I created a script on my laptop that automatically logs into OASIS for me at 11:30 am each day and forwards all new OCC messages to my email account. The Curtin bureaucracy hasn’t quite mastered that idea yet.
A somewhat agitated and embarrassed part of my brain is now telling me: “Voting! That means you, Dave, you prat.”
On May 16 we will have the right obligation to vote for or against daylight savings in Western Australia. I see both side of the argument, but on balance I’m happy with it. It does remain slightly hotter later in the day, and of course it’s darker in the early morning. However, I’m not up that early, and I’ll cope with an extra degree C if it means I don’t cycle home in the dark, and that we’re not left three hours behind the rest of the country. Doubtless others will disagree, and an overall “yes” result is hardly in the bag.
The trial process has been a little cynical in its implementation. This will be the fourth referendum on the same issue, and one gets the distinct impression that the pro-daylight savings forces are grudgingly putting a democratic spin on what some may believe to the inevitable march of progress.
For my own part, I’ll be happy if I make it to the polling booth, unlike the state election last year on September 6. I can tell you that date because it’s written on a letter I received from the WAEC entitled “Apparent Failure to Vote Notice”. I’m not in the least bit proud of this, especially since I was and still am a supporter of compulsory voting. However, it allows me to confirm that a penalty of $20 does indeed apply for not voting (not $50 or $120, as I’ve heard other people mention), unless you have a “valid and sufficient reason”. I figured that “I forgot because my brain was full of software engineering research” was probably not on the list of acceptable excuses, and paid my debt to democracy via B-Pay. (I’d been finishing off a paper for submission to the 2009 International Conference on Software Engineering that day, which was unfortunately later rejected as most submissions to the ICSE are.)
I’ve set my phone’s alarm to spring into action this time around, in case my brain doesn’t.
Update (2009-07-11): it has come to my attention that this page ranks rather highly when one searches for “Curtin University of New Technology”. Hence, I’d like to point out that you really should not take it at face value, just in case you were inclined to do so. This was intended to be satire directed at universities in general.
For a variety of reasons Curtin University of Technology, formerly Curtin University of New Technology, formerly the Western Australian Institute of Technology, is considering the radical option of changing its name. University strategists feel that the current name is unmarketable, because:
Therefore, other candidates include:
In the coming months, University strategists will consult widely with academics and prospective students in an attempt to find evidence to support the decision they’ve already made.