Blog Post 4 - Technology & Efficiency Part 1 - The Dawn of the Computer Lab and other 'Cutting Edge' Technology in School

 As I mentioned in my previous blog, the original perception and goal of the technology conception of curriculum was efficiency.  I can only imagine how novel emerging computer-based technology must have appeared in the 1980's when Vallance et al. were forming their curricular conceptions.

Okay, I don't have to imagine - I was in elementary school in the early 1980's!  My dad dropped us off at school about 30 minutes before school started, and I remember coming in from the cold on those early mornings into the sanctity and silence of the cramped computer room off the side of the library. 

 There in the dim light the faces of the other early morning arrivees were bathed in the neon green glow of those prehistoric Apple computer monitors.  Some of the screens weren't much bigger than two cell phones side-by-side, and I still recall the startup noises that sounded like a low-rumbling garbage compactor, as the computer wrestled with the floppy disks (the big, black, bendy ones) to load either Oregon Trail, Cross Country Canada or Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? 

Ahh... such good memories.  Technology in school was limited when I was growing up in the 1980's.  In contrast to the ubiquity of screens in today's classroom, they were still considered a 'treat', and the computer lab was entered with silent reverence.  I remember lessons about how to use the very basic word processors (I can still envision the little green turtle and flashing square cursor blinking their way across the black and green screens!), typing practice, and the games listed above.  In those days, though, even just using the computers themselves was fun - because it was all so new, and 'cutting edge', and very few if any of the students had computers at home. 

Besides those little Macintosh computers, there was an array of other technology that popped up periodically in our classrooms; I remember the lightning energy that whipped through the classroom when we'd enter after recess or lunch to see some marvel of technological engineering awaiting us in the form of a reel-to-reel projector.  We'd sit in anticipation, maybe rolling our eyes and giggling a bit as the teacher struggled to figure out how to get the ornery projector working without eating the film or smoking up the classroom.  That didn't matter.  Sure, the movie might have been a 1950's documentary on aerodynamics - but it wasn't math facts!

That's the biggest difference I notice between then and now: technology was a treat, and as a result, it grabbed and held our attention.  The games we played were educational.  Technology was almost entirely academic and bent on developing skills.  No TikTok. no Fornite, no Social Media, and no teachers feeling guilty if they didn't give the kids at least some time each week to feed their screen addiction with free time and frivolity.  When our teacher announced that today, for a special treat, we'd be watching a movie as a reward, we were hooked for the entire 90 minutes, and nobody called out "Encanto?  Uggh... I've seen that too many times... Can't we watch Riverdale instead".  Ooooooooh no.  We knew that any sort of complaining or bad behaviour would make the screen vanish back into the storage room, to be replaced shortly by some sort of penmanship exercise...

I miss that.  Because computer and technology use was not ubiquitous, it wasn't difficult to hold students' attention with simple programs.  In our minds, as students, any assignment or activity on a computer was better than the alternative of regular classroom pencil work!  A screen still held a degree of mystique - even if it was playing an ancient video presentation from a rusty reel-to-reel projector, or one of the even more archaic manual filmstrip picture projectors that required you to advance the slide at the 'beep' and sometimes required the teacher to read a script because there was no audio!  

Thanks for indulging my nostalgia!  In my next post I'll get into more about technology and efficiency specifically.  Hopefully you enjoyed my foray into the past, and got a kick out of some of the 'cutting -edge' technology featured!