It's Not About Computers
On January 3, 1983, Time magazine declared that the 1982 "man of the
year" was actually a machine: the computer. "There's a new world
coming again," Roger Rosenblatt wrote, "looming on the desktop." A
series of articles provided a thumbnail history of computing,
described different brands of hardware, predicted huge impact and
"awesome" sales figures, introduced people like Jobs and Wozniak and
walked through a simple programming example. There was even a glossary
for "gweeps." (According to Time, a "gweep" was a hacker suffering
from overwork. With 47,000 hits on Google today, the word is
encountered just a bit more frequently than "absquatulate.") "All
clear?" Otto Friedrich asked, "Those who think so are called 'computer
literate,' which is synonymous with young, intelligent and employable;
everybody else is the opposite."
1983 was probably a good year to start thinking about introducing
personal computers into university coursework. Many people had been
using them for years already, and it was clear that they would play a
very important role in the decades to follow. Some historians and
history educators were already there. Joanne Francis published
Microcomputers and Teaching History in 1983. Richard J. Jensen's
Microcomputer Revolution for Historians came out the following year,
as did Roy Rosenzweig's article on using databases for oral history.
Teaching history students how to use computers was a really good idea
in the early 1980s.
It's not anymore. Students who were born in 1983 have already
graduated from college. If they didn't pick up the rudiments of word
processing and spreadsheet and database use along the way, that's
tragic. But if we concentrate on teaching those things now, we'll be
No comments:
Post a Comment