Not Having to Be There

Information technology is changing our lives in both big and small ways. Sometimes it seems amazing to me that I lived so much of my life before the advent of the Internet. Now, I can hardly imagine not having the ability to run to the corner of a room and instantly look up nearly anything. It wasn't that long ago that answers were stored away in a special building called a library. The problem was it was far away and not always open. Sometimes, we just had to live without knowing.


Smaller changes can also have a big effect on how things are done. I was watching a foreign-language music video from Sri Lanka this weekend. In it, adolescent school kids ran to a wall to see a listing of examination or course marks. That was the only way they would know how well they'd done. For a minute or so, I thought how funny that seemed. Then, I remembered that during quite a few years at BCIT, we used to post the course marks in the same manner. To me today, that sounds stunningly archaic. I enter students' marks into an electronic grade book nowadays. They can check their progress on the assignments and projects during the course. From home, my students can login with ID and password in order to access them. If they wanted, they could do so at three o'clock in the morning.