I spent a very long day getting my winter session class ready. I still have a couple more hours of work left. I plan to finish it either tomorrow afternoon or Monday morning. The class doesn't officially start until December 19, but it goes live on the 5th.

It's an odd combination of technical tasks involving the courseware (blackboard), scheduling, intense brainstorming on how to achieve the same learning outcomes as in the academic year and summer, and finally translating that all into assignments. By 7 PM I was developing keyboard / mouse back strain. We are the modern variant of industrial workers, harnessed to our machines, which results in physical injury. And mental too? Are the machines our masters?

Why hasn't someone invented some other method for creating and manipulating information that doesn't involve a keyboard, a mouse or a touch screen? Why haven't voice activated solutions taken off, I wonder? Because it is just too hard to recognise speech?