Software Ate My Homework

A student emailed me yesterday, panicked, in the early afternoon. She was worried about her final project in my university course, which was due at midnight. By the time I saw the email, three hours had elapsed. By the time we got on Zoom to discuss the matter, another 90 minutes had been spent.That’s when I learned about the outage. Canvas, an online service used by as many as 40 percent of North American colleges, among them Washington University in St. Louis, where I teach, had gone down globally—victim to a ransomware attack. Just like ride-share apps replaced the physical act of hailing a cab, “courseware” such as Canvas has replaced more analog systems at almost every college and university, which now use the tool to run classrooms, manage assignments, and handle grading. When Canvas goes down, college classes cease to operate.My heart sank because already I could anticipate a million little irritations that would add up to a huge headache for everyone, as students worried about how to submit their work, whether they would be penalized, whether they could be given an opportunistic extension—and I worried about whether I would have to reschedule my weekend to complete grading by Monday. Students had already started emailing—Submitting my project just in case. Better safe than sorry. I get it—I’d threatened to refuse late submissions, but only because I had endeavored to push the deadline as late as possible in the first place, to give them as much time as I could. Of course, I wouldn’t hold this against them, but I understood their anxiety. Students are all anxiety, today. Every interaction begins and ends with worry.Later in the day, while I waited for the crisis to resolve, I watched the episode of Mad Men in which Don forces Megan to eat orange sherbet and then abandons her at a Howard Johnson’s in Plattsburgh, New York. Communication in this era was simpler: pay phones, whose calls may or may not reach their recipients. Ambiguity and uncertainty were assume