1970s Computer Clubs

Apple I

                 The Apple 1 as displayed at the Computer History Museum

On March 5, 1975, the Homebrew Computer Club first met in a garage near Menlo Park in Silicon Valley, California.

On that day, I was across the country in my last semester at Rutgers. I had taken one course in computer programming, using Fortran, which had been around in some earlier forms since the late 1950s. We used a box of punch cards to create a program. I had looked into the class as an auditor, for no credit and not on my transcript, because I had talked to the professor after an information session he gave, and he was curious to see what an English major would do in his class.

My afterschool and vacation job in high school was doing printing for a liquor distributor. They had a room with huge computers using tape drives and cards, and I would sometimes wander in there and talk to the operator. Of course, I understood nothing about what he was doing. He was in a unique place in that position because no one in the company understood what he was doing except him and his one assistant. And yet those computers, printed all the invoices which I would later have to box up and file in the warehouse. Though they were using the computer to print them all, no one could access that data from their desktop, so if someone wanted a copy of an invoice, they had to dig through a file cabinet.

That 1970 computer was certainly not for personal use, and no one had a personal computer because they did not exist. Most of my fellow students didn't imagine we would ever have a computer in our home. They were gigantic — a computer easily took up an entire room. And they were very, very expensive, costing about a million dollars each. Not even computer engineers or programmers who made a living working on computers had access to a personal computer.

So this California club served a real need for tech-minded people But many of these tech-minded people wanted to build personal computers for fun. And they decided to start a hobbyist club to trade circuit boards and information and share their enthusiasm. Among the early members were high school friends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Eventually, they would design and build what tey called the Apple I and II computers and brought them to the club to show them off. Lee Felsentein and Adam Osborne were also members and would create the first mass-produced portable computer, the Osborne 1.

Wozniak would write "The theme of the club was 'Give to help others.' Each session began with a 'mapping period,' when people would get up one-by-one and speak about some item of interest, or a rumor, and have a discussion. Somebody would say, 'I've got a new part,' or somebody else would say he had some new data or ask if anybody had a certain kind of teletype."

I started teaching in a junior high school, in the fall of 1975, and shortly thereafter, the school got a terminal that was connected to a mainframe at some university in New Jersey. It was first used by one of the math teachers for a kind of computer club. I did go to his classroom a few times just to see how it worked but I saw no connection to what I had learned about programming in college.

It would be a few years before the first personal computers appeared in the school   We had a lab that was used for the first actual computer class. It was a classroom full of standalone TRS 80s. TRS stands for Tandy RadioShack, though later they were nicknamed Trash 80s. I took a professional development class using those computers where we learned to program in BASIC. I created a vocabulary flashcard program that I was able to use with a few of my English classes during periods when the lab was not being used by the math teacher. The program was crude. The graphics were basically nonexistent, but the kids and I found it very interesting. 

I remember one teacher who was in the professional development class, saying we will all have to learn to program in the future. I was sure she was wrong. I had no doubt that computers would play a role in our teaching future, but I was also sure that other people would be writing the programs and we would only be users.

apple iie

The first computer I had in my classroom was an Apple IIe. Since I had some computer background and more so because I had some interest in learning more, I became the computer coordinator for the building. That meant my computer had two disc drives so that I could copy software that we had purchased and were allowed to copy.  MECC was a big source of classroom software back then.

The first computer I bought for home use was the same as what I had in my classroom which made sense because then I could use the software home too. This hardware was expensive. I paid more for the Apple dot matrix printer than I paid for my laptop last year.

We remained an aApple school, and an apple family for a few years until a new person moved into the position of district computer coordinator. He swapped out all the Apple computers for what we would call IBM clones, but we're the early Windows95-equipped computers. When I bought my next computer, it was one using Windows 95.

When I left teaching secondary school in 2000 and went to work at NJIT, all the computers used Windows except for the school of architecture, which was an Apple Mac building. They were their own little tech world. And so I lost contact with the Apple world in those days when even TV commercials and print ads would argue about whether you were a Windows or Mac kind of person. I remember one professor saying to me that he was surprised I was not using a Mac because I seemed like "a creative type."

Report: AI and the Future of Teaching and learning

I see articles and posts about artificial intelligence every day. I have written here about it a lot in the past year. You cannot escape the topic of AI even if you are not involved in education, technology or computer science. It is simply part of the culture and the media today. I see articles about how AI is being used to translate ancient texts at a speed and accuracy that is simply not possible with humans. I also see articles about companies now creating AI software for warfare. The former is a definite plus, but the latter is a good example of why there is so much fear about AI - justifiably so, I believe.

Many educators seem to have had the initial reaction to the generative chatbots that became accessible to the public late last year and were being used by students to write essays and research papers. This spread through K-12 and into colleges and even into academic papers being written by faculty.

A chatbot powered by reams of data from the internet has passed exams at a U.S. law school after writing essays on topics ranging from constitutional law to taxation and torts. Jonathan Choi, a professor at Minnesota University Law School, gave ChatGPT the same test faced by students, consisting of 95 multiple-choice questions and 12 essay questions. In a white paper titled "ChatGPT goes to law school," he and his coauthors reported that the bot scored a C+ overall.

ChatGPT, from the U.S. company OpenAI, got most of the initial attention in the early part of 2023. They received a massive injection of cash from Microsoft. In the second half of this year, we have seen many other AI chatbot players, including Microsoft and Google who incorporated it into their search engines. OpenAI predicted in 2022 that AI will lead to the "greatest tech transformation ever." I don't know if that will prove to be true, but it certainly isn't unreasonable from the view of 2023.

Chatbots use artificial intelligence to generate streams of text from simple or more elaborate prompts. They don't "copy" text from the Internet (so "plagiarism" is hard to claim) but create based on the data they have been given. The results have been so good that educators have warned it could lead to widespread cheating and even signal the end of traditional classroom teaching methods.

Lately, I see more sober articles about the use of AI and more articles about teachers including lessons on the ethical use of AI by students, and on how they are using chatbots to help create their teaching materials. I knew teachers in K-20 who attended faculty workshops this past summer to try to figure out what to do in the fall.

Report coverThe U.S. Department of Education recently issued a report on its perspective on AI in education. It includes a warning of sorts: Don’t let your imagination run wild. “We especially call upon leaders to avoid romancing the magic of AI or only focusing on promising applications or outcomes, but instead to interrogate with a critical eye how AI-enabled systems and tools function in the educational environment,” the report says.

Some of the ideas are unsurprising. For example, it stresses that humans should be placed “firmly at the center” of AI-enabled edtech. That's also not surprising since an earlier White House “blueprint for AI,” said the same thing. And an approach to pedagogy that has been suggested for several decades - personalized learning - might be well served by AI. Artificial assistants might be able to automate tasks, giving teachers time for interacting with students. AI can give instant feedback to students "tutor-style." 

The report's optimism appears in the idea that AI can help teachers rather than diminish their roles and provide support. Still, where AI will be in education in the next year or next decade is unknown.

Microlearning

In my years developing online courses starting at the turn of the century, we discovered quickly that students had no interest in recorded 90-minute lectures on tapes, CDs, DVDs, and eventually online. They hit the fast-forward button frequently.

I had learned in my secondary teaching years before my higher ed years that chunking material was essential.  Chunking is the process of breaking down instructional materials into smaller, "bite-sized" pieces and then arranging them in a sequence that makes it easier for your learners to learn the material. Think of how we write phone numbers: 800-289-9246 rather than 8002899246. We do it for dates, we make categories, chapters, heading, subheadings, menus.

The more current term for this seems to be "microlearning" which is used in education and professional development. These short, focused bursts of learning, are often delivered in the form of videos. Proponents will say that this is also effective for time-poor and attention-deficient learners, though that is arguable. 

We know that video accounts for the vast majority of Internet traffic. Of course, it's not all learning. In fact, much of it is entertainment, but educators can learn from how entertainment uses video and media. All those short clips from late-night talk shows or Saturday Night Live get far more views than would a full version of the show.

The effectiveness of microlearning depends on a range of factors: the quality of the materials being delivered, the context in which they are being consumed, and the learning objectives of the individual.

Microlearning in education, especially online, can include:
Text (in phrases, short paragraphs)
Images (photos, illustrations)
Videos (of the short variety)
Audio (also short)
Tests and Quizzes (yes, shorter is better)
Games (such as simple single-screen challenges)

MORE
https://www.umass.edu/ctl/resources/how-do-i/how-do-i-chunk-content-increase-learning

https://thepeakperformancecenter.com/educational-learning/thinking/chunking/chunking-as-a-learning-strategy/

https://elearningindustry.com/what-is-microlearning-benefits-best-practices

microlearning info
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Google Will 'Help Me Write'

Google recently introduced a new feature to their Workplace suite that they call "Help Me Write." This generative AI will first appear in Gmail and Google Docs. At the moment, it's available to a select audience of invited testers.

Like other generative AI, you will be able to enter a prompt and have a first draft created. for you.,An example Google shared is not having it write a paper for your English class, though it will probably be able to do that. They show the example of having it create a job description for a regional sales representative/

It's another AI tool that might frighten teachers because it seems to help students unfairly but I think this may be a misperception. As with other AI tools, such as the much-discussed chat GPT, I think the best thing educators can do is to introduce this to students and guide them in the ways that it can be best used and best used legitimately.

The evolution of digital literacy in classrooms will never end. Yes, these kinds of AI- assisted-writing tools present boyj opportunities and challenges for educators. But ignoring them or trying to ban them from student use is certainly not the solution. This tool and others like it are an opportunity to improve student writing skills and critical thinking. 

Google Announcements
https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-developers-google-cloud-workspace/
https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/generative-ai

demo
       Google Demo