Remember the paperless office? Neither do I, but I remember the promise.
One of the selling points of computers is that we can get away from using so much paper. If you work you know it hasn’t happened that way. At school we used to take role on scan trons and turn them in. A lot of paper but it was quick. Once through and we were done. We had a secretary who put them through the machine as a minor part of her day.
Now they want us to do everything on the computer. We are to take role, keep records of student work and figure our grades. Sounds great but the computer has a strange way of making information disappear. I am not good with that. Maybe it is just a lack of trust. So now I have to print my own role sheets if I want a record I can count on. When they printed the role sheets they were able to make two sheets of paper work for a 19 week semester. I require at least 24.
The computer also makes a lot more work because the bureaucrats can make mindless demands. One demand is that we have attendance in the computer in the first 10 minutes of class. To someone who sits in an office with a secretary, that may sound reasonable but, with a steady stream of students coming in tardy it means repeated trips to the computer. Oh, and they have it set up to bump you out of the attendance program if you wait too long. That means more time entering passwords and such. Then they print out the weekly attendance for all classes, send them to the teachers and require us to review it to verify the accuracy of the computer. Not only does it require much more time from the teacher but requires almost a full time employee to track.
I would say that we are using much more paper now that we are “paperless.”
homo unius libri
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