One Prof's Ponderings, Predictions, and Proclimations

Today I write on behalf of both myself and my students when I say that the technology these past couple of weeks has been a huge frustration.  Morningside just this year allowed students the choice between a mac and a pc (we are a laptop campus and issue all students a computer).  Many people knew of the change, but few of us were really prepared for the trickle down effect of the change.

Personally it has affected me in two classes that I teach.  In one class the program will work fine with a splitter on a mac, but does have times when it becomes buggy, but at least much of the time it works.  In the other class the pc software will not work at all on the mac os.  So now my mac students are having to borrow a friend’s pc with the software on it to compelte much of the course work.

At least this has opened up new discussion at least in our department of how to best deal with these macs (which in and of themselves are not evil, but many students are cursing their macs).  There are many coulda, woulda, shoulda’s in how we could have better prepared ourselves as a campus for this.  But we just got so used to most students having pc’s and having our software work on them that it just wasn’t an issue.

So, with new choice comes new frustrations but also new opportunities.  We must learn to work around them as most other campuses do.  We have just honestly been a bit protected from the platform compatability issues for several years.

This was more or less a rant, not against macs (my grad school advisor would likely dis-own me if that were the case!), but just that we needed as a department and as a campus to have been more prepared for these issues.