Every year during undergraduate, i would race to University Hall to pick up a copy of the latest course catalogue as soon as it was released. My best friend and i would sit in couch covered coffee shops over tea/juice and circle classes that looked interesting. The classes were ordered by departments with cross-references made. Each class had a full description under the title and professor. There was this glorious rush of all the things that we could learn and we obsessed over that book. The beginning of each semester was filled with the enthusiasm of rushing around on campus seeing if the classes lived up to their description.
Inevitably, some of the classes would be cancelled, change times or otherwise not match the promise of their description. Because of this and the cost of publishing those catalogues, most schools went digital.
There is nothing nearly as delectable about surfing terribly organized webpages looking for classes by title/professor only, having to click twice to find a description that is never there, a syllabus that is never submitted on a website that is often unavailable for this or that reason. Not only has searching for classes lost its joy, it’s outright irritating. I automatically skip over surfing the disciplines that don’t seem at all related – things like French or geography or art. And thus, as i learned last semester, i miss critical classes that would have been beyond interesting. But to find them in the sea of titles would never work. It takes 1 scroll-down bar, and at least 1 click to get to each discipline. You have to scroll down to grad-level classes (or click to next pages). And then click on every class whose inane title might actually be relevant. That’s a hell of a lot of clicks for nothing. After looking at 50 or so classes, i’ve given up.
But i found a new method! Of course, it will drive all of the pro-digital folks crazy because it’s just as flawed as the original tree-killing one. Now, instead of dealing with the hellish page, i go to the bookstore the day before classes. I take a notepad and walk through each aisle of textbooks. I don’t pay any attention to what discipline i’m in – i just look for things whose titles look interesting or whose authors i know i should read. Ooh – 3 Bourdieus, must be good, write down class number. I came out of the bookstore with 10 potential classes and then looked those up on the hellish website. They were in departments i never would’ve guessed (and some that i would’ve). I cut out all the classes that took place before 11AM or have 3 meeting times cause i know better. At this stage, it’s seminars all the way. And voila, i have class choices.
The funny thing is that this route is in theory far more unpredictable. There are inevitably classes with readers instead of books or where the professor forgot to order the books. But i found more interesting classes this way in 30 minutes in the bookstore than i did with probably 1 hour spent in online frustration. And i feel as though i have a general understanding of the topology of classes.
Now, this doesn’t mean that online course catalogues can’t work, but they need to be improved. Desperately. First off, it should be hyper simple for professors to upload their course books. In fact, they should upload it to the same system that orders it and puts it online. The course readers people should also connect all items there to the class because you know they have to document it somewhere since they call for copyright on all of those items. Given complete data, I should be able to search for authors that I want to read, not just professor’s names. I should have a little interactive system that shows what classes I’ve taken and shows me the topology of classes available, including a recommendation system. I should be able to surf the classes by similar content, across disciplines. I should be able to see the whole landscape, not just the terrible hierarchy of departments and numbers and navigate without a bazillion clicks. And dammit, i want a PDF that i can download and print out incomplete. Let me kill my own tree so that i can have the joy of sitting in cozy couches with a friend and cider, surfing all of the possible things i could take. Make the digital do more than my paper version ever could, but let me have my paper joy too.
i agree that digital course catalogs could be improved (and i miss the paperback stanford bulletin) but most of the problems at berkeley have to do with lazy professors who don’t upload their shit.
Can I just say “amen”? I have spent several years at a university where I felt I coudn’t find the classes I really wanted to take. It took me over a YEAR to figure out that I should look at unrelated departments, go through the bookstore the way danah did and look for books I’d like to read, email people incessantly and, generally, be a pain in the ass until I figure out exactly what I want to take. I still missed the classes I really should have taken for this reason or that, but mainly because there were no books in the bookstore, or the class was offered in a completely random department. If schedules of classes are going to go digital, they should be as anal about getting it together as they were for the paper version. When I helped make one at USC one year, we harped professors until they gave us class descriptions. For the digital version, however, there is nothing like that, so we get incomplete or missing descriptions and half-assed websites. My university is supposed to be one of the most wired places with a top HCI department… Seems to be wired for all the wrong things though…
Oh, yeah – the bookstore. That’s exactly how I did it every semsester. Also, I would sign up for double load, go to all classes during the first week to get a ‘feel’ for each course/instructor, then drop the half I don’t like. Never made any mistakes that way, never missed a good class, either.
It always struck me as odd that materials management methodology wasn’t applied to courses, materials and texts. A student browses for a class or materials no differently than a customer browses an on-line store. Or looking for documents related to coursework; why are they managed in the same way that law firms manage document production for cases?
Plenty of technology already out there to help students and teachers get where they want to be, get what they need, but there’s a big disconnect in seeing the parallel between a campus bookstore and managing inventory or legal casework for some reason…
Of course being efficient wouldn’t be as much fun as the tactile experience of browsing through bookshelves. (This is rather disonant though, for someone who’s not fond of libraries – ?)
It always struck me as odd that materials management methodology wasn’t applied to courses, materials and texts. A student browses for a class or materials no differently than a customer browses an on-line store. Or looking for documents related to coursework; why aren’t they managed in the same way that law firms manage document production for cases? Lawyers have to browse for the right document, after all, let alone the right legal text.
There’s plenty of technology already out there to help students and teachers get where they want to be, get what they need, but there’s a big disconnect in seeing the parallel between a campus bookstore and managing inventory or legal casework for some reason…
Of course being efficient wouldn’t be as much fun as the tactile experience of browsing through bookshelves. (This is rather disonant though, for someone who’s not fond of libraries – ?)
Oops, sorry, dueling browser burp!
As someone who’s partly responsible for managing all that content, I can tell you it’s a dream we all wish for. The catalogue content is in Quark, the registrar info is in PeopleSoft and the web is PHP and MySQL based. Oh, and the bookstore has its own proprietary system. It’s not exactly easy to move data around. Unfortunately 10-15 years ago, no one was thinking about the kinds of interrelation of data that you’re talking about. It makes a lot of sense, though, and we talk about it all the time.
Rayne – am i supposed to be 100% consistent about my quirks? I sure hope not! ::wink::
I used to do the bookstore thing, too, not just for classes to know about but things to read, topics to find out about, faculty to know about. But the university bookstore requires faculty to order books early in the *preceding* semester, and students can get books quickly online — so the university bookstore is rapidly becoming an incomplete and probably biased view of what’s offered.
The beauty of a physical catalogue is that it forces a nexus, a point in time where the infinite possibilities describing a class collapse into the concreate reality of whatever is printed in the catalogue (albiet representing changing and possibly outdated, untrue or unflattering information).
This is what we don’t get with a fluid, open ended live method of presenting course information linked with book lists, urls or other media.
There’s no reason we can’t “treat” the web catalogue with same respect and urgency that we give to a print deadline 6 months in advance of semester. But we don’t as a rule. Why? Are our IT people too accomodating? Does this reflect the perception of malleability, and immediacy of web resources, perhaps even devaluation?