It’s amazing how technology has changed over the years. I was thinking about this recently, in relation to my mother. She lived for 91 years, and during that time she witnessed cars becoming ubiquitous, the invention and expansion of television, the development of video and home video recording, cheap flights, fast trains… The list goes on and on.

I am not old enough to experienced quite as many dramatic changes as that, but as far as the world of education is concerned, there have been quite a few. I thought it might be interesting to try and document them from a personal point of view.

Oh, and just for the record, I am not writing these “technobiographical” articles in a spirit of nostalgia. As I have said before, as far as I’m concerned, the best thing about the past is that it’s the past. The technology we have today is wonderful; who would want to return to an earlier era?

I have documented my pre-video days in I was a teenage geek, so you may wish to read that first.

My university years are in three parts:

• my first degree

• my post-graduate certificate of teaching, and

• my Masters degree

My first degree

Not much technology to speak of here, I’m afraid. The nearest I came to anything electronic were a photocopier and a calculator that my girlfriend had.

The photocopier produced very shiny, grubby-looking copies, laboriously slowly – around 30 or 40 seconds per page. It also cost 10 pence a sheet which would be roughly £1.79 today. (Such calculations are fraught with difficulties: they take into account inflation, but not purchasing power. Nevertheless, using a website, and http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/Historic-inflation-calculator-value-money-changed-1900.html, I was furnished with very similar results.)

That meant you would only photocopy something if it was not only crucial but far too difficult or time-consuming to reproduce by hand, eg a complicated graph or table. We students had to be very good at summarising textbook chapters and journal articles!

As for that calculator, my girlfriend’s father had made it himself from an electronics kit costing £5. That works out to just under £90 in 2013 prices.

We students had to be very good at mental arithmetic too!

I do vaguely recall that some tutors used overhead projectors, but mainly it was lecturing or, if one of them was really cutting edge, “chalk-n-talk”.

It was all pretty grim, but of course, at the time we didn’t think it was grim: it was just normal.

But my post-graduate certificate of teaching (PGCE) year was much better….

See part 2 for that.

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In this occasional series, I am outlining the sort of technology I’ve been obliged to use at various stages of my life. On the whole, I think things are much easier now than they have been at any time in the past, especially for teachers. When I did my first degree, for instance, photocopiers produced poor quality copies, very slowly, and at an exorbitant cost. (I wrote about this in the article My grim and distant techie past: the uni years, part 1.) These days, you can buy a multifunction printer for very little outlay, and have a photocopier, in effect, right there on your desk at home, producing copies for a few pennies each.

Once I left university clutching my degree certificate, I hastened to enrol for a Post-Graduate Certificate of Education (ie teacher training) course at Brunel University. I didn’t know much about the university, but on being shown around prior to my interview, I realised very quickly that the campus was awash with technology. So when, in the interview, the interviewer asked me what I thought of the idea of teachers using technology, I replied something to the effect that it would be a poor teacher who didn’t try to use different types of technology in order to do the best possible job they could.

“Ah”, replied the interviewer. “You sound like the sort of person we want here.”

And I was offered a place on the course.

The interesting thing for me is that, on a conscious level, I knew that that was the correct answer to give, but I wasn’t entirely certain that I actually agreed with it. After all, teaching, according to ancient wisdom, may be summarised quite succinctly as:

“First I tells ‘em what I’m going to tell ‘em; then I tells ‘em; then I tells ‘em what I’ve told ‘em.”

Surely you don’t need a vast amount of cutting edge technology to do that?

The reason that I said my answer to the interviewer was “interesting” is that I discovered quite quickly that I really did believe what I said! In fact, I still do: take a look at my answers to @ictevangelist’s three questions about technology; especially:

“[…] what sort of education would it be WITHOUT technology?”

Brunel University was just 11 years old when I started my course there. It had been born in 1966, only three years after Harold Wilson waxed lyrical about the white heat of technology. I have to tell you, it was fantastic. It was a long time ago now, but here’s what I remember about the technology we were allowed taught how and encouraged to use. Remember, this was in 1975.

1. Video cameras to record ourselves teaching; that may not sound like a big deal today, but back then video cameras were large, expensive, and almost unheard of in schools;

2. study booths containing video players and cassette tape players: again, almost unheard of. Schools’ educational film material comprised television programmes that had to be watched as they were being broadcast, and 16mm films, and slides that involved using a slide projector, which could be a nightmare to manage effectively;

3. extensive video and audio cassette library;

4. overhead projectors: we were taught how to create permanent transparencies with overlays in order to demonstrate processes

5. banda duplicators: we were shown how to create multicoloured worksheets; there’s a nice article about this by Rosemary Hampton: The school banda.

6. stencil duplicators: we were shown how to create stencil-based worksheets – including multicoloured ones, which I can tell you were extremely laborious to do!

7. We were also shown how to create linear and branching “programmed learning” materials for use in the classroom. (If you’re interested in how that worked, you’re in luck: I wrote about it in My analogue program.)

These days, you can achieve all of the above, but so very much more easily. Taking the items listed above in turn:

1. Easily achievable now. If your school doesn’t have a video camera, you can just ask a colleague to film you with their phone. Yes, I realise you will need to think about permissions and so on, but my point is the tools needed to make such a record are carried around in people’s pockets and handbags;

2. everyone has access to such resources now: there’s the internet of course, not to mention the Teachers’ TV archive, iPlayer and similar, YouTube, etc etc;

3. see #2 above;

4. you can achieve the same thing now using interactive whiteboard software or PowerPoint, or video animation;

5. multicoloured worksheets were fun to create with a banda, but could take hours. The different colours were produced by changing the backing sheet: see illustration.

6. Illustration to show the top sheet and backing sheet of a banda, and the process of producing a multicoloured.worksheet

7. These days we can do that on a bog standard computer;

8. The backing sheet was a layer of ink, in effect, so that when you wrote on the top sheet, your text or drawings were that colour. So let’s say you wanted to produce a bar chart with different coloured bars to represent male and female. You had to draw the female bars using one backing sheet, then change the backing sheet before drawing the male bars;

9. as for multicoloured worksheets using a stencil, life was too short. You would have to change the drum inside the machine, and then clean the rollers to get rid of the first lot of ink used. Then you would have to line up the stencil absolutely precisely, otherwise you would end up with the new coloured parts not being aligned properly with the original ones;

10. as you can see from the article  mentioned above, creating a programmed learning resource was very time-consuming. Actually, it still is, but at least now if you make a mistake you can correct it very easily, leaving no trace of the error; that’s much harder to do when you’re working with paper.

I don’t miss the old technology, but I do think there were two advantages of using it compared with what we have today.

First, it did make you more careful. If, for example, you made a mistake while preparing a stencil-based worksheet, it was a terrible job to correct it. In fact, sometimes it would be quicker for you to just start again. So, you tended to not make mistakes!

Second – and this is almost the opposite point – because it took so much effort to produce something good, you didn’t fall into the trap of trying to make it perfect. Nowadays you can tweak and tweak and tweak until you realise that your worksheet has been through 15 iterations and it’s now gone 2 am. Fifty years ago, you very quickly reached the point where you said: “this is good enough”.

Nevertheless, I’d never go back to those old ways even if I could.

One last thing. Having been spoilt by Brunel, it was always my dream to have a sort of reprographics room in my home, a room where I could prepare fantastic materials and not worry about the cost of reproducing them. Well, now I have all that: except it’s not a room, but a computer, printer and connection to the internet!

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I first reviewed the Carrot2 search engine in 2016. I found it quite useful then. What’s the story now?

The default search engine for most people is Google. However, Google does have a couple of characteristics that are not always useful.

First, it tends to learn what websites you like, so it will, over time, present you with results from the same websites. This can be useful if you cannot recall the name of a brilliant website you found through a Google search some time ago, but not quite so useful if you want to be presented with something a bit different to what you normally come across.

Second, it’s become polluted with ads and affiliate links. I don’t knoiw about you, but these days I prefer using an AI app to Google, despite the risks of “hallucinations”. Anyway….

Third, it presents the results in a list. Sometimes it’s useful to have the results presented in categories. That’s where Carrot2 comes in.

The Carrot2 search engine presents the results in a list, but also in categories, as you can see in this screenshot of a search I carried out on “self-publishing". If I were to click on one of the categories on the left, the related results would show up on the right.

There are two other views of the results as well.

The Pie Chart view converts the categories into segments of a circle. The bigger the segment, the more search results there are in that category.

The Tree Map view does a similar job, just in a different way.

Unfortunately, when I tried Carrot2 this time, it gave me a lot of useless results. When I typed in my own name, it came up with hardly anything, and I’m not exactly unknown. So, worth tryimng, perhaps, as it gave me different results from a Google search but, again, not as useful as AI.

   

Perhaps the easiest way to bring your writing to a wider audience these days is to do it yourself. The longest-running approach has been to start a blog. There are no gatekeepers, and within legal and commonsense limits you can write what you like.

Having your own blog also means that you are less likely to lose your work because a third party owner has changed their priorities and decided to "unpublish" your contributions.

You also tend to have the freedom to format the text however you like —fonts, colours and wrapping text around pictures.

Starting your own blog does, however, have significant downsides. You will almost certainly need what is called your own domain. For instance, if your name is Freda Bloggs, you might buy a web address domain -- like www.fredablogs.com, which you will have to pay for every year.

You will also need a certain amount of technical expertise, especially if you want to monetise it.

You will also have to promote it like crazy without help. Not much, but some -- in order to get the most out of it. Having said that, I don’t do much at all in that direction because I find the idea of self-promotion rather obnoxious.

So what about Substack? Substack is, in essence, a cross between a newsletter and a blog, but all the heavy lifting has been done for you. You could start your own Substack blog right now in about five minutes: https://fredablogs.substade.com.

Monetising it is easy, and Substack provides you with various ways to promote it. For instance, if you leave a comment on someone's article, anyone reading that comment can click on your name and he taken straight to your Substack blog. Substack makes recommending your blog very easy as well.

Regarding the monetisation aspect, I speak from experience. Twenty or so years ago I set up a paid-for newsletter. Although it was successful, I packed it in after a year and gave all my subscribers a pro rata refund. Why? Because dealing with all the admin side of it, like setting up and maintaining a SQL database on my computer, was not how I wanted to spend my time. Substasck does all that for you.

A Substack blog is free to set up, and Substack articles by other people are free by default unless the writer has made them paid for.

Disadvantages? You don't get all the formatting options, and everyone and his dog is on Substack, including some very big names. That means that standing out from the world can be challenging, but not impossible.

Also, the constant introduction of newe features, and the torrent of articles and Notes (Substack’s answer to X), saying how you can get 5,000 subscribers in five minutes is all very waring.

Also, I never quite trust any product or platform where I am, in effect, the product, so I have to keep reminding myself to back up my articles and subscriber lists, and download the backups just in case the rug is pulled from under my feet.

Nevertheless, for the momemnt at least, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages as far as I’m concerned.

If you want to start writing on a regular basis for what will be, hopefully, a growing readership, there is probably no better place to start. Where to start reading Substack? Well, mine of course! Here’s my Digital Education newsletter.

   

I came across an interesting article in a newsletter called Hacker. It describes how AI’s effivciency has actually led to an increase in one company’s workload. Here it is:

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It