Papyrus?

I rather looked forward to writing something here today. It's now Thursday afternoon. I'm sitting at the teachers' workstation and my students are making use of the comfortable environment in our computer lab. Nevertheless, they are writing midterm examinations with pen and paper.

For at least a decade, I've been waiting for the day when a larger portion of my classes will be via a network. I started teaching Communication classes for ESL students at BCIT ten years ago. From those first classes, I received occasional student work in electronic form. I can remember using class sets of floppy discs. When was the last time I handled one of those? Nowadays, a much larger portion of classroom management occurs online because of myBCIT. They do assignments in specialized message board areas, write email, and share files.

Yet on those dreaded days of midterm and final exams, it all goes back to an exam booklet and a pencil. Will we still be stuck in their weird anachronism in 2017?


This fuzzy scan is one decade old and shows some students
from one of my first classes at BCIT in the autumn of 1997.