Monkey business

I took my wife and son to see the animals yesterday. No, not the football crowd at Plymouth Argyle. I refer to the wonderful animals at Paignton Zoo, especially the baboons. Morrison's Supermarket is right next to the Zoo, and I remembered that they had a great little restaurant there. So that's where we went for lunch. Now I wish we hadn't.

We got in line and waited. And waited... and ... waited. Five minutes went by. The queue was in the same place, not moving. Ten minutes went by. I looked down the line and then spotted the hold up. At the checkout there was a poor woman of mature proportions struggling to operate the touch screen till. We waited... and waited... five more minutes passed and the thoughts were going through my head that I would soon need another shave if I were to look half way respectable when I later had my photo taken with Mr and Mrs Baboon.

So we waited... each transaction seemed to take about 4 or 5 minutes, because the poor woman on the till just couldn't seem to get the hang of it and kept having to restart each new transaction. Several of her colleagues appeared in cameo roles, monkeying about with the screen, trying to fathom out how it worked. Eventually, after about 20 minutes of waiting, during which time 2 people died of old age and my son was carried screaming from the building (slight exaggeration - he was only sobbing), we eventually arrived at the head of the line. We ordered our meals and drinks and waited... and waited. Tap, taptap.... tap...... taptaptap.... The poor till operator just couldn't get the hang of her till touch screen. But she remained remarkably calm. I peered over her shoulder and noted that the screen had multiple touch squares, each of which led to another set of options, which in turn led to another set ... you get the idea.

She was hopelessly undertrained (of course I blame the management, and also the designers of the till who it seemed had overcomplicated matters - the till screen was incredibly badly designed). In the end I resorted to helping her out, pointing out which sequence she should tap to enable us to pay for our meals so we could sit down and eat them before they grew hairs all over them. The amazingly stoic members of the British public in the line behind us kept their counsel and not a word was said, not even so much as a rolled eyeball, even though just about everyone was by now fuming with frustration. And so we paid for our meals and sat down. Next I noticed that the till lady had been relieved of her post and suddenly to everyone's relief, the queue started to move faster. She was sent off to clear the dishes and do the washing up, poor woman.

But it wasn't really her fault. I blame the management for setting someone loose at the sharp end of a busy restaurant without checking to see if she was up to the job. And the designers for not creating a system that was transparent.

Got me thinking about the opacity of some VLE systems. OK, this is my opinion, but many VLEs are not fit for purpose, and masquerade as solutions for the management of online learning. Some are merely glorified e-mail systems. Others are overpriced aggregations of web tools that you can get for free out on the web if you know where to look for them. I have not seen a single VLE system yet that works so transparently that students think more about their learning than they do about how to make the damn VLE work. Again, I don't blame this on the users - it's a management and design issue. When will we get VLEs that do what they are supposed to do, and with minimal cognitive effort on the part of the student? When the baboons start operating the checkouts at Morrisons restaurant, I guess...