Inside a Microsoft Computer Lab
My sister needed help studying for a Microsoft Computer Lab test. After taking it, she showed me the exam. She got a hundred.
It really made me laugh to think about how they went out of their way to call it a Microsoft computer lab, then had the students take a very easy examination which two computer literate slackers had no trouble passing. I love to laugh. They had three groups, one of five questions and two of four. Each group shared the same multiple choice answers, more like a matching test as opposed to a real multiple choice test. All the questions simply matched rather lame definitions against one of the shared terms.
Looking at the terms and definitions, it occurred to me that some words have changed. For example, they match “Home Page” with the page which a browser loads upon starting, which I would call a start page.To me, a home page refers to someone’s personal web site. They also refered to saving a local copy of a web page as downloading. To me, downloading refers to saving a file. I wouldn’t consider saving a copy of the currently viewed web page as downloading it, because I have already loaded it. On the other hand, if I explicitly save a single web page, or a hierarchy of pages, I would call that downloading them, since I went out of my way to save them, if that makes sense. Of course, to me, a “computer class” refers to a computer science class, not this hilarious joke.
Things change. When I took my note-taker to class, people still considered it a novelty, and treated it as such. Now, they have kids taking classes and even exams remotely. This opens the door to all sorts of opportunities for good or ill. It also allows for such a disconnect, that the professor would never know which. Why even go? What do students pay for with that sort of arrangement?
I hope you have enjoyed my tour around the potential Microsoft Lab of the future. We will do this once a week for a little while, so I may have more tales of hilarity to report.