Course Technology Requirements
An excerpt from my syllabus
All assignments in this course must use Google Docs.
Do not test my patience with attachments, Notes App screenshots, or god forbid, paper - which, I have heard, comes from trees. We are, for the duration, shackled – yes, shackled, let us not mince words – to the Google Workspace. Submission via any other digital (or, should the horrifying notion even cross your mind, analog) medium will be treated as a deliberate affront, a tear in the very fabric of our digital reality, resulting in a grade of zero and a quiet, internal scream. Only the digital void where your work should be will echo.
I. The Sanctum Sanctorum: Your Course Google Drive Folder
Before you dare to commit a single, flickering pixel to the screen concerning, for instance, the crushing weight of societal expectation in The Seagull, you must first construct your personal digital mausoleum. Each student is commanded to create a dedicated Google Drive folder. This is not a mere administrative bagatelle; it is a foundational ritual, a digital headstone marking your brief, flickering presence in this course, and perhaps on this earth. A folder for every soul. How neat.
II. Folder Naming Convention (Immutable, Inexorable, Inescapable)
The designation of this folder is of paramount, even terrifying, significance. It is your digital sigil, the one flickering light by which I shall attempt to discern your intellectual output from the howling, infinite static of the cloud. The precise format is as follows:
COURSECODE_SEMESTERYEAR_LASTNAME_FirstInitial_StudentUniqueIdentifier
COURSECODE: As decreed by the university’s faceless bureaucracy (e.g., ENG347).
SEMESTERYEAR: (e.g., FA2025, SP2026). Adhere to the prescribed two-letter seasonal cipher.
LASTNAME: Your officially sanctioned surname. The one they’ll put on your debt notices.
FirstInitial: The primary initial of your given forename.
StudentUniqueIdentifier: The final four digits of your student identification number, immediately followed by the initials of a literary character whose tragic flaw most mirrors your own deepest, unacknowledged anxieties (e.g., 9876HH for Hamlet's indecision, 1234CB for Catherine Barkley's doomed romanticism, 5678AK for Anna Karenina's… well, you know). If you claim to possess no such anxieties or literary doppelgangers (a state of denial I find both pitiable and professionally insulting), you shall inscribe BLANK and I will understand. Oh, I will understand.
Example: ENG347_FA2025_Loman_W_1949HH
Upon its conjuration, this folder must be shared instantaneously with me, granting me "Editor" privileges. I promise to wield this horrible power lightly; I will not in fact, edit. In fact, this is to afford me the dubious honor of witnessing your scholarly contortions in real-time, to observe the digital ectoplasm taking shape. Or not. Failure to enact this sharing protocol with the requisite alacrity and precision will be interpreted as an act of profound scholarly nihilism, and your subsequent digital whispers will be treated with heightened scrutiny.
III. The Arcane Art of Inscription
All your written pronouncements, from the most perfunctory observation on the symbolism of the cherry trees (they’re just trees, aren’t they? Or are they? The cursor flickers, it never commits) to your sprawling dissertation on the inherent meaninglessness of existence as refracted through the prism of Uncle Vanya’s piano, must be birthed and nurtured directly within a Google Document. Your thoughts, for the moment, remain inaccessible, but as soon as you decide to download them from the meatdrive behind your forehead, their only destination must be the pristine white rectangle of a clearly-labelled Document. This Doc (here I use the diminutive form, as though it’s a close relative or pet) must reside, quivering, within your afore-shared sacred folder. The university, in its relentless pursuit of… something (efficiency? surveillance? the complete atomization of human thought into trackable data points?), insists upon this. They claim it deters the more… collaborative interpretations of academic integrity. I make no such claims. I merely observe the cursors. So many cursors, blinking in the shared space. Are you even there? Or are you just another Anonymous Axolotl?
As you embark upon the Sisyphean task of translating your fleeting, butterfly-wing thoughts into the cold, hard glow of the monitor, consider the medium. This is not vellum or stele. Paper is a dream vaguely recalled. No, this is a Google Doc. There is no -ument, and no need to save. Allow the relentless auto-save function keep your words safe. Safe from what? Deletion? Oblivion? Or merely from the terrifying responsibility of having actually written something? Allow every mutation of your mind to be meticulously embalmed in the “Version history.” A history of cowardice, mostly. A testament to second thoughts and the quiet desperation of trying to sound clever for an unseen, unknown grader who is, themselves, slowly dissolving into the screen’s indifferent glow. All is recorded in the Google Document, and yet there is nothing to record. In my life too, all of my life’s achievements remain meticulously recorded in the cloud, but only in the cloud. Where is this cloud? Can I see it? Does it look like Gusev’s triumphal arch? Trigorin’s grand piano? Or is it something stranger, unnameable? If I could touch it, would its wispy tendrils leave my fingers damp with the residue of thought? So too, your arguments, your carefully curated quotations, your poignant rhetorical questions about why Tuzenbach had to die – they are but electrical charges, data packets, a minor fluctuation in Prince William County’s annual energy consumption.
Strive for clarity, yes, if such a thing is even possible when the only reader of your words is another creature of the flickering screen. Your essay on the symbolism of the samovar in The Three Sisters is not a monument carved in stone; it is a flickering, unstable constellation of pixels, endlessly rearrangeable, endlessly mutable, until the deadline descends like a power outage, plunging everything into a temporary, blessed darkness. And even then, it persists, a collection of ones and zeroes, a faint digital echo of your engagement with the material, an engagement that feels increasingly like trying to catch smoke with a sieve. Let the very architecture of Google Docs seep into your prose and out of your pores. We are all avatars now.
When you cite your sources – and cite them you must, with pathological attention to the minutiae of the Chicago Manual of Style, for the correct placement of a comma can, perhaps, ward off the encroaching void – remember the hyperlink. Oh, the seductive, treacherous hyperlink! A shimmering blue promise of deeper knowledge, but so often a portal to an endless, click-baited labyrinth of tangential distractions, from which one emerges, hours later, sticky with information, yet starved of wisdom. Ask yourself: is this learning? Am I sure?
IV. On the Specter of Algorithmic Composition
And now, we must address the latest arrival to our digital carnival of distractions: the generative pre-trained transformer, the so-called "Artificial Intelligence" writing assistants. ChatGPT and its myriad cousins. They have materialized, unbidden, like a new, particularly articulate poltergeist in the already haunted house of modern composition.
You may be tempted to "collaborate" with these entities, to solicit their "assistance" in the crafting of your analyses of, say, the existential despair of Raskolnikov. And who am I to stand athwart the relentless march of technological progress? Use it, if you must. Consult the digital oracle. Ask it to expound upon the symbolism of the churring insects of the steppe. Why not?
Should you incorporate phrases, sentences, or entire paragraphs conjured by these digital djinns, you are required to cite your spectral co-author. A simple footnote will suffice: "The preceding passage on the tragic implications of Anna Karenina's railway scene was generated by ChatGPT, version 4.5, on [Date], in response to the prompt: 'Explain Russian fatalism, but make it sound smart.'" Failure to do so will be considered not merely plagiarism, but a rather pathetic attempt to pass off the machine's cold logic as your own warm-blooded thought. And yet, when was the last time you checked your thought’s pulse? Could it have died sometime in the previous semester? Would you know?
Be warned: the machine does not understand Chekhov. But then again, who does? I do, allegedly, but how would you know? What are student essays, dissertations, and my own lectures but various combinations of hallucination and regurgitation? Is a thought born of warm, bloody lump inside a skull more valuable, miraculous or real than one born of silicon? If a machine can write a passable essay on The Cherry Orchard, what, then, is the purpose of you writing an essay on The Cherry Orchard? What is the purpose of me reading them? A question I increasingly ask myself, staring into many tiny boxes of the Canvas interface. Perhaps we should all just submit prompts and let the algorithms debate the finer points of Russian realism amongst themselves. It would certainly save us all some time.
V. The Dual Altar of Submission: Google Drive and Canvas
The mere act of typing your final, despairing full stop into the Doc, while representing a cessation of immediate hostilities with the blinking cursor, does not, alas, signify the end of your obligations. For reasons mired in bureaucratic inertia and a profound institutional distrust of singular digital entities, your work must be offered up, a sacrificial lamb, at two distinct, and equally unforgiving, altars.
By the appointed hour, you are to:
Ensure the supposedly definitive iteration of your Google Document lies, trembling, within your shared Google Drive folder, correctly named as per the folder’s sacred, nonsensical convention, and fully accessible to my increasingly strained editorial gaze. (Is it the final version? Can anything truly be final in a medium designed for perpetual flux? The question haunts my waking hours. And some of my sleeping ones.)
Download this very same Google Document, performing a strange alchemical transmutation from its native, ethereal Doc state into the marginally more corporeal format of a PDF. This act of digital conversion must be executed with flawless precision. The machine demands it.
Upload this resultant PDF to the designated digital oubliette on Canvas, our university's chosen platform for the solemn entombment of student endeavors. (Another portal. Another password. Another set of blinking lights.)
Think of the Google Document as the restless, tormented soul of your work, forever capable of being poked and prodded. The Canvas PDF, then, is its ghost – a snapshot of a fleeting moment of perceived completion, forever trapped in the throes of final submission. Both must be present. Both must be punctual. A failure in one realm casts a long, dark shadow over the other. This sacred, maddening duality ensures that, should one digital dimension collapse into a black hole of server error, the other might, just might, preserve your meticulously crafted arguments about the crushing ennui of provincial life long enough for a grade to be wearily assigned.
Your monastic adherence to these technological mandates is not merely a matter of procedural compliance; it is the very bedrock – a crumbling, unstable bedrock, perhaps – upon which your academic performance (if such a term still holds meaning) in this course will be judged. Approach these digital rituals with the gravity, the meticulousness, and the mounting sense of existential dread they so clearly, if bewilderingly, demand. The blinking cursor awaits. And I… I also await. With an increasingly tepid cup of tea, a flickering monitor, and the growing suspicion that we are all just ghosts in the machine.
VI. Extensions
Please ask for extensions via email at least 24 hours in advance.