Waiting Shade
Computerized madness
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Ni Bobbie Malay
Turmoil swept and battered the campus of the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, last week, as the university crashed into the giant pitfall of computerization.
This semester it had been planned that computerized enrollment would begin, thanks to which thousands of students would be able to sign up for hundreds of courses with efficiency and speed.
It seemed to be an excellent idea. Year after year, the problems at registration time had only gotten worse and worse. Basically, they had to do with available resources-teachers, classrooms, facilities- being insufficient to meet student needs and demand. Lines started to form as early as 5 o'clock in the morning. By 9 or 10 o'clock, required courses would have filled up their assigned quotas. Sometimes with a parent in tow, students rushed about desperately chasing those fast-disappearing class cards. Faculty members stayed away from their offices, where students lurked waiting for a chance to wheedle or whimper their way into an overcrowded section.
And so when university authorities announced that they were working on a plan to let technology take care of these mundane irritations, the usual voices of opposition did not make themselves heard. After all, everyone had heard how, in universities abroad, one could accomplish student registration simply by pushing a card and punching a few keys.
The process began almost a year ago, when schedules of classes were drawn up months earlier than usual. Grumblingly, the colleges and departments cooperated. Then the students were asked to "write in" their choice of classes for the next term. The computers went to work, matching supply and demand, after which they spewed out individual slips of paper telling each student where she or he had been "accommodated" or "unaccommodated." (At this point, stylists started to deride the inelegance of the term; the level of intolerance was audibly rising.)
After more rounds of paper shuttling back and forth, and a series of meetings where problems were aired, the storm broke on the first day of registration.
While some students breezed through the new system, most of the others were not so lucky. The computers just couldn't cope with information the way human beings do: namely, try to make some sense of it. They kept making decisions that anybody could have said were obviously wrong. There seemed to have been an excess of faith in what technology can do.
As a result, people felt they were banging their heads against a row of tyrannical machines irrationally making them enrol in courses they had already taken, shutting them out from others they needed in order to graduate next March, rejecting repeated entreaties, canceling out the actions taken by real live humans.
Some said faulty programming was responsible for the chaos that reigned for several days. Others were not so charitable-trust fractious intellectuals to sharpen their knives at this kind of provocation. Everyone says that, well, the old "manual" system doesn't seem so bad now, after all.
Are we ready yet for the next millenium, or even just the next century? What's it going to take? The experience tells us a little of what needs to be done, and that's a consolation.
Si Bobbie Malay ay propesor ng pamamahayag sa University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. Dati siyang reporter ng The Manila Times at Taliba. Siya at ang kanyang ina na si Paula Carolina S. Malay ay nagsalin sa Filipino ng America is in the Heart ni Carlos Bulosan, at ang obra nila'y nanalo ng National Book Award mula sa Manila Critics' Circle. Kasali rin ang kanyang mga sanaysay sa mga antolohiyangTelling Lives at Coming to Terms.
