I know you've all been waiting on the edges of your seats for the results of the poll I put up last night, so here it is:
You guys are pretty convinced that Zoom meetings, working from home, and telemedicine are here to stay. Conversely, you're pretty skeptical about distance learning, the permanent end of handshaking, and the end of trade shows. Everybody loves trade shows, after all.
I'm probably more skeptical than most of you. I figure that things like working from home and holding more Zoom meetings will get a bump, but nothing huge, and the others will mostly just fade away. We'll see.
NOTE: Just a reminder that participants could vote for as many items as they agreed about, which is why the percentages add up to far more than 100%.
Now wait a second there...am I gonna have tooo hold the elevator now????
I suspect what will happen in many cases is not replacement of one thing by another, but an additional option, more freedom to choose. Will be interesting to see if Justice Thomas continues asking questions when SCOTUS goes back to in-person.
Wasn't there one about less business flights or something or did I read it wrong? If there wasn't, that's my vote for the biggest change we will see (from the people I've talked to.)
To me, it was more along the lines of:
- If you're sick, then
--- stay at home,
--- work from home,
--- order food for delivery,
--- and use telemedicine.
Hopefully the stay home when sick really digs in. I agree wholeheartedly with you. The opposite in my work culture is very true, and very infuriating.
Remember that one sicko editorial and the writer's defense of 'office culture'?
Sicko...office culture... That's what she...
My #1 choice was movie theaters. I used to go to the movies with friends 1-2 times per month. What I have realized in the last year is that I don't miss it at all, and I'd much rather for us to gather at someone's house to watch a film streaming than go to a theater.
OT: How many vicious, sadistic killers in uniform are out there?
https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/article_c58cc014-b8b5-11eb-92c9-0f73eab2ad75.html
I was on the fence about working from home but came down on the minority "won't continue" side. How many employers are willing to give up that much control over ordinary salaried employees' time? Also there are the IT headaches that covid forced employers to deal with, but that they might rather not deal with at scale in the future. (And I think there are good reasons for people being together in workplaces, but that's not really the question.)
I'm also skeptical that public transit ridership will recover, outside a few major metro areas. Which actually makes my position more consistent than the consensus, because if you work from home, what's the incentive to get back on the buses and subways?
You guys are pretty convinced that zoom meetings, working from home, and telemedicine are here to stay
Wishful thinking. I mean that literally. People understandably want to be freed from the burden of commuting to the greatest extent possible. And this is consistently showing up in polls (not just Kevin's). They might be right. But gotta say I'm skeptical, though: on the one side we've got something made genuinely necessary by a once in a century plague. On the other side we've got literally millennia of agglomeration effects demonstrating there's apparently some economic advantage for people to come together in groups. (For similar reasons the "cities are dying!" hyperventilating was obviously complete nonsense from the getgo).
It's not that I'm so convinced remote working won't continue to rise, it's that A) my perception is it had finally (finally!) begun to rise quite a bit already, several years back (and so the trend isn't pandemic-related at a fundamental level) and B) the rise, because of the reason mentioned above (the agglomeration-loving nature of our species), won't be transformative so much as marginal, and, post-pandemic, will substantially depend on the economy/labor market (the scarcer workers are, the more concessions employers will offer) as well as the desirability of an individual worker's skillset in the marketplace.
(I know, I know, there are anecdotes out there about rising productivity during the pandemic, and there's the savings on office space. We'll see in five years where we are!)
I chose "distance learning" as my #1, IIRC. And that's not because it's the equal of in-class learning (far from it, ask any teacher!), it's that now that schools have worked out many of the kinks, we'll likely see a permanent increase in remote teaching (vis a vis pre-pandemic levels) to deal with things like snowstorms and other phenomena that used to result in cancellation of classes. Why would you want to cancel classes when you now have a quite viable work around? Also, schools that have to compete for students can (and I believe will) more aggressively offer remote options.
I am never shaking hands again.
At a minimum I hope it has eliminated the awkward stranger hug forever.
God I hope distance learning does not hang around but I fear it will. Our fearless leaders see the cheapness and the ability to discard full time faculty, and not the fact that has slapped all teachers in the face during the last year -- distance learning is distant but it is not any kind of learning. I'm the only person in my department who tried to do anything other than recorded Powerpoint lectures.
No real teacher-student feedback, or at the least, it's greatly attenuated. Admittedly, this is because of the makeshift nature of most Zoom rigs. Me, I want a pair -- no, three -- 24 inch screens and some decent writing software before I'll concede that distance learning is anywhere near as effective as the in-class kind. And say, whatever happened to the humble back-of-the-magazine correspondence course?
That's how I learned pet surgery.
I learned how to draw from Bazooka Joe.
Here's to hoping education will get a full rethink - if anyone had gone into a public school in the past 20 years you'd see packed computer labs every day. Distance learning exposed the true nature of learning to REQUIRE non-didacticism (too lazy to look up the word). My wife's an art teacher - she can tell you everything you need to know about what works in person and what doesn't, and how hands-on example-based learning beats lectures and recorded Powerpoints every time, no matter the subject. But there also is A LOT to be said about a child learning the skills of self-discipline, self-guided learning, self-instruction, etc., because the "real world" lacks 101 classes for almost all jobs - you have to teach yourself everything, as soon as you leave college...and REALLY learning it...and, uh oh, it's actually enjoyable when you REALLY learn stuff. Please end standardized testing.
Working remotely is a matter of life circumstances I would say. If I didn't have a small child I would have gone in every day during the pandemic, and I'd go back full time as soon as I could. Now I can work from home on days I need to provide all the transportation and not have to leave work at 3 every day to pick him up...I'm just home. I can work right up until I have to pick him up, then go back to work for an hour once I get home because I can work from three feet away from him while he has a snack and plays. Hard to do that without a laptop and VPN. But isn't that special treatment because you made a life choice you did not have to make? I guess so. Here's to hoping parents with small children will get more special treatment...those payments won't hurt.
Agglomeration is a phenomenon but one with plenty of fluidity to it. Commuting was getting out of hand. Two hours a day commuting is a lot of lost productivity and a drag on one's own sense of balance. Life is too short to sit on a train for ten hours a week, or in traffic. OR you argue that commute time is productivity time if you can answer those first 50 emails from the train or the car, then do "real work" once you are in - OR use that commute time to indulge in hobbies or basically make it "me time" while you just happen to be surrounded by other people or while you are on a highway. I was getting pretty good at it well before the pandemic - podcasts, open courses, audiobooks, etc.
I did that out of absolute necessity - it was not just a luxury.
Just like with the disillusionment in the established orders after the Black Plague of the mid-14th Century, with the unleashing of humanism and ultimately the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Exploration, global trade, the Renaissance, etc. and the very real demand for freedom from serfdom, monarchy and theocracy, perhaps this plague will disrupt our priorities in fundamental ways. I do laugh when I see voting restriction legislation, when people will just go back to their high school gyms to vote when the deadly contagious disease awaiting them in 2020 isn't so prevalent any more. "But Democrats overwhelmingly voted by mail, they'll freeze when they have to vote in person again!!!"...um, besides being Democrats, we're also adults, aren't we? Yikes.