I am preparing to move rooms, having been in my current one since my appointment as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 2004. A lot of 'stuff' has accumulated since then - to add to the small mountain of files that moved with me in that particular year. And in sorting the mountain out I keep coming across interesting documents from the past.
One I have just found is a student handout labelled "The Use of the Internet", and indicates that it is intended "for those who have not used the internet before". It is dated January 1996. That's less than 20 years ago, and within the lifetimes of students who will graduate this year. And I remember that back in 1996 virtually no student (at least in Geography) actually HAD used the internet before they reached their third year (for whom this handout was intended). I wrote that handout less than two years after the first world wide web conference was held at CERN, and whilst various standard web protocols were still being worked out and implemented. I don't know whether was at the start or the end of the adoption curve for my department, although I suspect near the start. My handout ran to two-and-a-half pages and included information on such things as URLs, hot links, searching (I recommended Lycos), and the two-letter country codes for most of Europe (I was teaching a course on that continent). I noted that the internet could be quite slow: "Delivery is generally quicker earlier in the day, before Americas wake up and start using their computers." [Was that actually true? I don't know.] But I know now that I was wrong in explaining that "Because the internet was invented in the USA, servers in that country have no national identifier in their address, just as British stamps do not have a country name on them."
Today we take the internet for granted: I wonder how many of today's students could cope with the style of literature and information searching that was necessary up to, say, the mid 1990s. We can't turn the clock back, though. Journals now are delivered on line with no hard copy available, and we have all adapted to these developments.
In throwing old materials out I have also noted changes in the way I have illustrated my lectures. I did make some use of overhead transparencies for diagrams, tables and so on, from the very start of my craeer, but until the 1990s most of my illustrations were in the form of slides. These, of course, necessitated planning head since the technical staff took time to convert paper versions of materials into 2 x 2 inch transparencies. All the illustrations for my inaugural lecture, in April 1998, were transparencies.
For a time I mixed slides with overheads. The latter had become very easy and quick to produce - as long as one always used the right, thicker, acetates in the photocopier (something that one of my senior colleagues never learnt, polluting the departmental atmosphere with acetate burned onto the photocopier, and necessitating a technician call out from the leasing company). But by then I had a vast collection of slides, including hundreds taken of European cities (which was the theme of many of the lectures I was giving at the time). Mixing slides with overheads meant one could write on blank copies of the latter during lectures, taking feedback from group discussions in the lecture theatre, for example.
From my work on the sedimentary layers of papers in my room I can date my changeover to Powerpoint pretty precisely - the session 2003/4. From then on all the acetates disappeared from my active lecture notes, and indeed my style of lecture notes changed. From originally two sides of typescript per one hour lecture I pregressively moved to no notes at all other than the Powerpoint slides.
But just as we could not now easily go back to information retrieval without the internet, it would also be impossible to go back to earlier technologies of lecturing - we just don't furnish our lecture theatres now with slide or with overhead projectors.
And that leaves me with one problem - what should I do with all those photographic slides I have of Paris (over 1000), Berlin (around 500), Lisbon (maybe 250), Düsseldorf (100) and other cities? At some point they will become interesting as historic documents, but for the time being the little boxes in which they sit, labelled, are just gathering dust.
How technology has changed the way we work!
One I have just found is a student handout labelled "The Use of the Internet", and indicates that it is intended "for those who have not used the internet before". It is dated January 1996. That's less than 20 years ago, and within the lifetimes of students who will graduate this year. And I remember that back in 1996 virtually no student (at least in Geography) actually HAD used the internet before they reached their third year (for whom this handout was intended). I wrote that handout less than two years after the first world wide web conference was held at CERN, and whilst various standard web protocols were still being worked out and implemented. I don't know whether was at the start or the end of the adoption curve for my department, although I suspect near the start. My handout ran to two-and-a-half pages and included information on such things as URLs, hot links, searching (I recommended Lycos), and the two-letter country codes for most of Europe (I was teaching a course on that continent). I noted that the internet could be quite slow: "Delivery is generally quicker earlier in the day, before Americas wake up and start using their computers." [Was that actually true? I don't know.] But I know now that I was wrong in explaining that "Because the internet was invented in the USA, servers in that country have no national identifier in their address, just as British stamps do not have a country name on them."
Today we take the internet for granted: I wonder how many of today's students could cope with the style of literature and information searching that was necessary up to, say, the mid 1990s. We can't turn the clock back, though. Journals now are delivered on line with no hard copy available, and we have all adapted to these developments.
In throwing old materials out I have also noted changes in the way I have illustrated my lectures. I did make some use of overhead transparencies for diagrams, tables and so on, from the very start of my craeer, but until the 1990s most of my illustrations were in the form of slides. These, of course, necessitated planning head since the technical staff took time to convert paper versions of materials into 2 x 2 inch transparencies. All the illustrations for my inaugural lecture, in April 1998, were transparencies.
For a time I mixed slides with overheads. The latter had become very easy and quick to produce - as long as one always used the right, thicker, acetates in the photocopier (something that one of my senior colleagues never learnt, polluting the departmental atmosphere with acetate burned onto the photocopier, and necessitating a technician call out from the leasing company). But by then I had a vast collection of slides, including hundreds taken of European cities (which was the theme of many of the lectures I was giving at the time). Mixing slides with overheads meant one could write on blank copies of the latter during lectures, taking feedback from group discussions in the lecture theatre, for example.
From my work on the sedimentary layers of papers in my room I can date my changeover to Powerpoint pretty precisely - the session 2003/4. From then on all the acetates disappeared from my active lecture notes, and indeed my style of lecture notes changed. From originally two sides of typescript per one hour lecture I pregressively moved to no notes at all other than the Powerpoint slides.
But just as we could not now easily go back to information retrieval without the internet, it would also be impossible to go back to earlier technologies of lecturing - we just don't furnish our lecture theatres now with slide or with overhead projectors.
And that leaves me with one problem - what should I do with all those photographic slides I have of Paris (over 1000), Berlin (around 500), Lisbon (maybe 250), Düsseldorf (100) and other cities? At some point they will become interesting as historic documents, but for the time being the little boxes in which they sit, labelled, are just gathering dust.
How technology has changed the way we work!
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