How many academics does it take to turn down the volume on a TV set?
Five. At least that's how many I saw yesterday huddled around a remote control trying to figure out how to stop a video from blasting our eardrums out.
That was at one of the few sessions I attended that even used technology. Everyone here carries a laptop and cellphone, but we tend to deliver papers the old-fashioned way: by standing behind a podium and reading from the pages. When we try to use technology, we're not very good at it. I saw a scholar get all befuddled when his PowerPoint presentation insisted on running backward, and another struggling to get his laptop hooked up to the television and then, upon learning that he had only 15 minutes in which to deliver his paper, closing the laptop so he could prop his paper on the lid and just speaking extemporaneously for just over 14 minutes.
Me? I just read my paper and prayed that no one would ask me to change a lightbulb. How many academics does it take to change a lightbulb? Nobody knows; the project never got past the subcommittee stage.
3 comments:
And what was your paper…?
My paper was
a. about 20 minutes long
b. pretty darn clever
c. delivered to a room full of mostly empty chairs, only four of them occupied
d. all of the above
"Colon cancer: The explicatory de-phrasing of America" or, "How the Lecturer got his spots" (a shadow play with music)
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