Making History

I was struck by the pace of change as I read through the size information — from the big floppys (which were in fact floppy) I saved my work on when I had an IBM PC jr (the Edsel of the PC world) to the Terabyte backup drive I bought last month — I was reminded of the description Steven Ambrose wrote of the world in 1800 at the beginning of his book on Lewis and Clark (Undaunted Courage)  He wrote about the technology in the world in the age of Jefferson, and the fact that the technology was the same as Jefferson’s grandfather and his grandfather too.  Jefferson’s moldboard plow was really the biggest tech change for farming since the Roman period!  From 1800 on, the pace of change has been the big story about technology.  (I keep thinking of the old James Burke series Connections, I wonder if some of those are on YouTube, I would not be surprised).  So if Jefferson (who loved new technology — he dreamed about having a hot air balloon to travel from Mount Vernon to Washington DC) would have had some trouble with the technology his grandchildren found normal, and that trouble has just gotten worse for every generation sense then.  That is not to say that I don’t think Jefferson or anyone from an earlier generation can’t figure out how to use new technology.  I think the interesting point is that what we have to get used to is change.  We need to teach students to get used to learning new stuff all the time.  ”Lifelong Learners” can’t just be a slogan.  It has to be the way we work all the time.  

So, since the exercise was to embed video, I went off to find Connections, and of course had no problem finding this video (and many more).

So back to the pace of change.  Students think of Web 2.0 as normal.  I think it is normal too.  But what comes next?  What comes next?  We don’t know.  So the challenge is to teach the skills we need to deal with change.  To embrace what is good about the new, save what we love about the old, and learn the ways we need to think about the difference between the two. 

So, bits and bytes.  The history of computing is interesting for itself.  As a historian, of course I want people to know about this stuff.  But the other part of it is the legacy stuff.  Some of what we do now, what we call things, how we talk about what we do, and even how we do stuff comes from past versions.