Professor Prose

I've written about the UC System-Wide online sexual harassment tutorial several times before, first in this blog and then in the Virtualpolitik book, as an example of what Ian Bogost has called "procedural rhetoric." Gone are the cartoon characters of the earliest iteration, although characters in the scenarios continue to have silly names to go along with their departmental or institutional identities. The emphasis in the version of the tutorial that I took this week emphasized the case law involving sexual harassment with more ____ v. _____ cases summarized than opportunities for role playing. Links on the tutorial often went to PDF files of policy statements from the University of California.

The programming of the actual software showed little progress four years hence. Pages were slow loading, curly quotes were rendered as nonsense, and icons sometimes automatically downloaded into one's image editing software. As if that weren't enough those who completed their certificate and wanted to check that the system had registered it online might accidentally restart the tutorial from the very beginning and thus seem to cancel their scores.