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by toyg 1314 days ago
That's probably because IT busywork replaces manual busywork.

Before: you take a stack of papers, and go through each one with a red pen.

Now: you log on a system, wait, click on something, wait, click on something else, wait... the stupid tests are auto-graded, but chances are there is still something you have to grade student-by-student, and that's now slower to do. Plus, obviously, the usual annoyances (got to update this, got to reboot that, my typing is 5WPM, etc etc).

2 comments

"you log on a system, wait, click on something, wait, click on something else, wait..."

You know, if someone wants to write The Next Great JS framework, give me one that above all else prioritizes latency and expert-level usage. There's no fundamental reason we can't have most of the nice things from the modern graphical web, and get to the legendary efficiency of those text-based consoles... but it will take some work and thought. (For example, you're going to need to insert yourself in between the user and the browser's concept of events, so you can buffer up commands the user is typing while their target hasn't quite loaded yet. This is one of the fundamental reasons why GUIs are less efficient than TUIs, though by no means the only one.)

This framework won't take over the world, but it sure would save a lot of people a lot of time.

Sooooo tiiiiirrrrreeeeed of programs that take seconds to do every... little... thing!

Also, the UX is usually awful.

I remember having to use educational software in college for a discussion board and it was terrible and sucky. I could only imagine what the teacher end of it looked like.

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For a comedic look at how this affects teaching, the new comedy show Abbott Elentary has an episode on this. It’s like Parks and Rec but at an inner city Philadelphia public school.

Ugh, should say Elementary.