Ten Reasons Why

I was talking with some Blackboard co-workers today about some of our partners and prospective partners that are creating solutions around PDA’s in the K-12 education market. We were noting that PDA’s as educational tools in K-12 (or higher ed, for that matter) really haven’t reached critical mass yet.
One of us commented on how much things had changed since we were kids. (We’re all thirtysomethings.) I recalled three specific instances of technology disrupting the educational structures from my own middle and high school experience.

1. The biggest technology disruption I remember was, believe it or not, the Erasermate pen. Erasable ink! What a concept! For some reasons, though, teachers that frequently required that work be completed in pen, instead of pencil, were terribly averse to the Erasermate. I think most of them hated it because Erasermate ink was notoriously smeary, but I distinctly remember one teacher saying of answering questions on a test “If you can’t write it right the first time, you shouldn’t get the chance to correct it.” Silly, but true. Erasermates were, for a time, banned from my school.
2. Sometime in the early 80’s, I got a good ol’ Commodore 64 computer. Sixty-four KILOBYTES of RAM! Whoa. Now that was power. And I had a 5.25″ floppy drive, which was smokin’ compared to the cassette tape drive. And get this — I had a dot matrix printer. Sexy! I remember turning in a paper that I had proudly printed out on the dot matrix printer, which promptly got handed back to me by the teacher with instructions to “use a typewriter” since the text was “unreadable.” Apparently the fact that the dot matrix was incapable of printing letters with descenders that actually descended below the baseline was flipping her out.
3. By far the biggest disruption occurred in my AP Computer Science class in 1984. I’ll never forget the day. Bill Carloni, our CS teacher, wheeled in an AV cart with this funny little box sitting on top of it. What the heck is that? we asked. “This, gentlemen,” Mr. Carloni said (which he could say because there were no girls in the class), “is the future of computing. Nothing will be the same after today.” Of course, what he had was the original Apple Macintosh. Our first assignment that semester had been to write a Pascal program on the classroom Apple IIe’s that would draw a circle on the screen in the Apple IIe hi-res graphics mode. That was it. Use cosine or sine or some such math nonsense to compute the coordinates and draw a circle. And here was Mr. Carloni, booting up this computer that had pictures on the screen like a game (who knew they were called “icons”?!?) and launching something called “MacPaint” where you could draw a circle with a pointer controlled by a hunk of plastic with a wire coming out of it. A mouse? Well, yeah, I guess it kinda looked like a mouse…

Mr. Carloni was right. Nothing was the same after that.

Greg Uncategorized