Keeping stuff: How to preserve course papers despite technological change

Course management systems

When I gave this talk in 2001, the College had just started to experiment with the Blackboard course-management system, and I used it as a kind of case study, trying to predict whether it would make it easier or more difficult for instructors to preserve course papers. On the positive side, Blackboard uses human-readable file formats and publishes some of the interface information that programmers need to develop applications that interact with it. On the other hand, Blackboard has an elaborate security system that tends to limit authors and readers. (For instance, by default, it places Web documents behind a barrier of password protection, ensuring that their distribution is limited to readers who have paid tuition and fees or are employed by the College.) More generally, Blackboard is proprietary software and suffers from many of the limitations that I have noted here in other proprietary software: a cumbersome interface, fragility (in Blackboard's case, dependence on Javascript, frames, and cookies), and instability.

In my teaching, I have ignored Blackboard, but I did contribute to two of the ``courses'' that administrators set up on topics of community interest: one concerning the College's mission statement and another dealing with strategic planning. The first of these courses had disappeared by the time I gave the 2005 version of the talk. The discussions recorded in it may be archived somewhere, but the tool for searching within Pioneerweb no longer finds them.

The course on strategic planning is still available. In spite of the fact that Blackboard went through a major version change in 2003, the Pioneerweb administrator succeeded in preserving almost all of the useful information stored in the course. I notice, however, that the datestamps for the original posts were overwritten in June 2003. I imagine that this is an artifact of the transition to a newer version of Blackboard -- a small entropic effect similar to the appearance of zeroes in the output of my FORTRAN program, making it impossible to determine the order in which posts to different threads were written or to correlate the dates of the posts with events and documents outside of Blackboard.