Notes from the Breville University of Technology

From Sofia Scientia

Re: Breville Learning (a message to our Visionary Cheerleader)

I have always assumed you thought the e-infrastructure problems at UWS would eventually be solved by the NBN some time in the next decade and that was why you did nothing to tackle them, despite the fact that on any given day you can arrive on the Penrith campus (but presumably not the Werrington North part of it) to find not only no network, but no power and even no water, though the last is another story.

A couple of weeks ago, however, I was astonished to discover how much of the Bankstown campus is a wireless black hole. Not so much in the courtyards between buildings, apparently, where I had to sit downloading my email under an umbrella in the rain, but in the buildings themselves. Even in the School technician’s office. I had assumed my own perpetual connectivity problems were due to under-resourcing of technical support which meant I could never get my software properly installed (though that is certainly part of the problem, I’m reliably informed).

But not the whole problem. Whereas you can pick up the UTS network in the tunnel at Central Station, Usyd from a coffee shop in Forest Lodge and UNSW at the Randwick race course (or so I’m told, since I have never actually tried the last), UWS wireless is about as reliable as winning the lottery. I guess this is why UWS is not And we included on the Lost on Campus smart phone app along with every other metropolitan university in Australia – there would be no point, really.

At Bankstown, it seems, wireless actually works best in the car park close to the buildings, where I can’t park because those spots are for the management types whose salaries are big enough to afford them. Which is a shame, really, because being able to work from my car would be preferable to the broom cupboard stuffed with everything none of the permanent residents wants in their own offices currently offered me as a hot office. And at least it would be all my own space, with secure document storage (as required by the terms of my Ethics Clearance) in the boot and the back window serving as a bookshelf, while the back seat could be occupied when needed by students requiring consultation sessions, or used for Teaching Group meetings, now the staff has been whittled down to a skeleton by disposing of all those Boutique Units.

Under these conditions Breville Learning strikes me as an inspired solution pre NBN. If students are rarely on campus the demand for wireless is diminished and they can use their own resources at home instead. Presumably staff will be encouraged to work more often from home as well, also saving university resources – including office space. Which rather begs the question about all the building going on around the place now, including the new Janice Reid Library Palace I believe is slated to dominate the hitherto architecturally uninspired Kingswood Campus, and which will doubtless be visible from Penrith, perhaps even Castle Hill, so imposing and on such grand a scale (as befits a lasting monument to you, Dear Cheerleader) will it be. It will need to be eye-catching on the outside, because no one except a few technicians will ever to get to see the inside, since all it will contain are the servers and so on needed for our bookless future. In fact it could even be built on the very site where all those donated books were buried about 15 years or so ago because there were insufficient library staff to catalogue them. A commendably economically rational double purpose building then, in spite of its apparent extravagance, this shiny pinnacle of the digital future – both a monument to you, Dear Cheerleader, and a memorial to dead books.

But oh, wait, maybe it will need to be a book-filled library after all. Because we’ll need hard copy, since on current indications we’ll never be able to access any UWS-managed e-library reliably. (And actually as you told us the other day, you’re not really part of the digital age, so perhaps a state of the art e-library wouldn’t really be appropriate to perpetuate your memory).

But a book filled library will mean students and staff will need to come onto campus, so we will need wireless, and we will need offices… Now I’m confused. What was the plan again?

cc says:

October 4, 2012 at 12:19 pm

From ‘Shorn of the (not yet) Dead’

Star trekking across the looneyverse

Dear Captain Janway,

As you can probably tell, I’m a bit of science fiction fan. I love the way that SF ‘blends’ reality and fantasy. As the ‘UWS Enterprise’ hurtles through space to boldly go where no university has gone before, I thought I’d post an entry from my star blog along the way. I was at your visit to our school the other day, where, along with our fellow astronaut ‘Buzz (I can fly) Lightyear’, you came to listen to our questions about our latest stellar mission, ‘Project Blend’ and that little bit of ‘judicious’ clipping you want to do. As I was listening to you tell us how much you ‘didn’t know’ about what was happening below the deck, I started to speculate in a SF kind of way (I’m a self confessed fanatic, after all) about what you saw when you looked out at us. The first blended image (we could call it metaphor if we wanted) that popped into my mind was that of a pen of fattened and fluffy merino sheep in need of a good fleecing (please write if you would like to know what we thought we were looking at. It might entertain you in a SF kind of way, as an alternative view to the ‘My Voice Survey’, perhaps. That ‘vision’ ended up in a slightly cracked mirror, didn’t it?) We might look like cloth ears to be ‘cut’ for next year’s UWS ‘fashion show’ but we’re not blind. Or for that matter deaf. And I have to say, Mission Control, that the official language is awful, really really bad. So bad it hurts to look at it.

Help me Rhonda, but that last email about the recent Academic Year Review (another mirror-work in progress it seems) did not knock my socks off. It make my eyeballs bleed (sorry, I’m blending genres here, aren’t I? Although, shouldn’t that score me one of those certificates you lot are always handing out ‘Wizard of Oz’ style? Sorry, there I go again, blending …). The ostensible function of the review seems to be to promote the vision of a trimester system. You write that ‘consultation is still ‘ongoing’ and that the review ‘team’ is holding ‘focus groups’ and ‘meetings’ with staff. Your next sentence reads ‘We will now spend some time reviewing your feedback and are committed to working with you to review ways in which we could provide students with a more flexible and enriching learning experience.’ How weasley is that? And then you say ‘It is expected that a decision about the next steps will be made by the UWS Board of Trustees by the end of the year.’ Why bother with the review or consultation, I ask? Meanwhile you encourage us ‘to provide further feedback via the online form’. What kind of dodos do you think we are? The last time UWS had anything that resembled a representative system was donkey’s years ago. And, I have to say, with reference to a fellow abductee from planet Earth, I now know how Ford Prefect felt when the Vogons strapped him into their poetry appreciation machine, a restraining harness which was the only means whereby they could get a sentient being to listen to them, and not without she or he feeling violently ill.

In the flowerbed of philosophy, a rather weedy character once observed that it’s the discourse of the torturer that observes the niceties and phatic functions of language. It’s the victims that scream and use bad language. He and his grassy mate also noted that phatic ‘innocuisms’ are really ‘order words’, they’re about putting you in a double bind and getting you to comply with a hidden and often brutalising agenda.

That’s it for now. I’m about to teleport to the ‘signature’ campus of Starfleet command (I choose to travel this way because its smarter than having to exceed my yearly workload travel allowance trying to find a parking spot, and I haven’t yet found a way of eating my car. It also prevents me from getting into the habit of using it as an office as a fellow star-trooper suggests ). ‘Beam me up, Scotty’.

Siggie Frued says:

October 5, 2012 at 9:18 am

Ah yes, the poetry appreciation machine – in fact I was thinking of Skinner’s baby crib, on view at the History of Psychology Archives in the US, and designed with the best of intentions, no doubt. A safe environment for the valued infant: a glass box furnished with a rattle but from which you could be fairly sure no sound would ever be heard.