Digital Fun

 

All over the news this morning was the story about the hacking of Canvas, an online educational system used by some 8000 institutions, both colleges and grade schools.  From what I gathered, an outside group hacked in and demanded a ransom, and the whole system was shut down by the company as a precaution. The problem is that some 8000 institutions are very much relying on this system, and this being a week when a lot of finals happen, this was a big problem.  The system has since been restored, and the company claims nothing of significance was stolen, but I'm sure there will be more to this story as time goes by.

This doesn't affect me much.  My process hasn't changed much the past 500 years.  I cut wood with iron, so I'm really barely out of the stone age.  And on the eve of Y2K, I even made a woodcut from a log using stone tools (see above), just to see if I could continue to make woodcuts if civilization collapsed, as some predicted it would.  (as it turned out, we didn't even lose cable)

However, once upon a time I was a college professor, and Canvas would have been relevant. I believe my community college took it on around the time I was let go there.  (full timers were entitled to all the classes and wanted them and were paid for them, even if the classes didn't happen because the students couldn't stand them)  Meanwhile, my state supported four year school was freaked out by Covid, and this accelerated their plan to shift as much as possible to an all online system.  I was still on staff during the start of the pandemic, and we had to scramble.  At least with my class we could.  I felt bad for students and teachers with things like furniture making, or ceramics, where access to classroom  equipment was vital to the process.  On very short notice I shifted as much as I could to an online process, posting everything to my own site, and doing the rest with e-mail.  That, and allowing students to substitute whatever materials they could find for what we had asked for at the beginning of what we thought would be a normal semester.  Somehow it worked.  The school thanked us for what we did, and in the same e-mail said we could never do it again, for now they were arranging an online system of their control.  That turned out to be Blackboard, a system that was already failing across the country, but it had been decided far above my department.  As a special bonus, the class I had been teaching the past 15 years (always with weekly syllabus approval each semester) was completely changed to something new- new projects, and only done in the order they had decided.  I still was willing to teach the class, and was originally listed as the assigned faculty, but the computer system decided I wasn't fit and I was let go.  

As it turned out, Blackboard was let go after two years (no surprise to me) and replaced with Canvas.  And that is what the school still has.  (I don't know if it's still at the community college, but that they did go through 2 or 3 other online systems before adopting Canvas)  What I was thinking about today was that for the past few semesters, I always taught on Fridays.  I didn't mind- I thought there was less traffic on the Parkway on Fridays, I never had a problem with parking (other days may have been worse), and one day is the same as another as far as work goes.  Even the last classes that I temporarily had were on a Friday.   I have no idea if I was still there if I would still have Friday classes, but if so, this would have been a terrible day to have classes, with the whole computer system down for hours.  No final exams in art classes, but final projects and papers were due.  

All I will say now is that there was never any hacking my grade book or my paper syllabi, or my personal website.  And everyone learned something.  It was a fine system.