This weekend just gone, I was working down at Brunel University at an event organized by Prof Mariyln Leask, MirandaNet and funded by Becta. The aim of the weekend was to draft up an advisory paper on ICT Tools for Future Teachers and about 30 of us gathered from the Primary, Secondary, FE and HE sectors to share our thoughts and ideas regarding this topic. More than that I cannot say at this stage as the paper is still being drafted, however I wanted to share one interesting moment from the start of the weekend.
One of the first things we did was to share a ‘Eureka’ and a ‘non Eureka’ moment regarding our experiences with ICT. They were far ranging and sometimes very personal accounts of enlightening moments from the past concerning people’s relationship with technology.
It would be great to learn of others people’s moments, so if you have time, please share yours here.
I guess I should go first …. My first position after graduating in the late ’80s, lasted for about eighteen months. I worked at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London researching vilus atrophy in immune compromised patients. Amongst other things, I collected data and uploaded it onto a computer database. After I had been doing this for some weeks, I was instructed to leave the computer turned on over night once a week on a Tuesday, as someone in Denver would be collecting the information.
That’s a long way to come every week … No no no … came the reply. This person would use their computer in Denver to send a message to mine in London and then through the grey wire that came out of the back of my computer and went into the wall, all the information would be electronically transferred across 1000’s of miles. I was stunned that such a thing could happen, but remember, this was the late ’80’s …. and this was my first Eureka moment of many with technology.
Today, technology is emerging so fast that Eureka moments come thick and fast as new and innovative uses are found for old, current and new technologies. Only this morning I can across Jing … Wow! What a powerful piece of kit.
Eureka - Ordering my first book on Amazon.co.uk
Non-eureka - today trying to view a movie I just took on a new camera and finding that Quicktime required an extension/plugin so that it would play…
As you say, so many Eureka! moments that I have given up baths and stick to showers. I learned how to write computer programs in the dark ages (70s) and twenty years later, when the first graphic calculators were introduced in an A Level Maths syllabus, I wrote my first useful program for work. It wasn’t amazing until a student asked me if I could program, and when I confirmed that I could I was astonished by the look of deep respect on his face. Before that moment, I had just assumed that it was no more difficult than the 7 times table.
Eureka … mapping data in a very early GIS program called Secos 3. Creating a first imovie was also very significant.
Non-Eureka … [recently] Facebook privacy issues