It's happened happened to pretty much everyone
who’s ever taken a college class — your professor thinks he knows what
he’s doing with a simple piece of technology, but doesn’t. Sure, it
doesn’t have the easy user-interface of a blackboard, or the simple
startup procedure of a textbook, but hey, how hard can it be to figure
out in the first five minutes, right?
Well, because he won’t admit
that he’s clueless, the doomsday scenario plays out: for the first half
hour or so the class stares in amazement — while texting their friends
furiously — as he fiddles with buttons or browsers or dials or PowerPoint lectures
and makes himself look like a fool. Please, kids, help this
hypothetically flustered academic and just do it for him. Yeah, he
probably knows more about self-enforcing Italian political systems than
you, but that doesn’t mean he knows how to restart a computer or
minimize a browser.
Of course, this would all be just
hilarious and we could all surreptitiously laugh about it and call him
a jackass later that night at the bars, except stop to think about it
for a second: we’re dropping some pretty serious tuition dollars for
this professor to mess around in class under the pretense of teaching
us.
Let’s get something straight here:
technology is complicated, and it’s unreasonable to expect every
professor to understand the nuances of digital projectors, editing
software, classroom response devices, PowerPoint lectures or even — God
help you if this is true — Internet browsers.
<snip>