LeRoy Finkel is a recent addition to our wiki’s list of Pioneers. We wanted to bring attention to him now because we just discussed one of his compatriots: Bob Albrecht.
A list of pioneers can seem like a long string of individuals. While many educators were alone in their struggles to bring computers into classrooms, many were also fortunate enough to find support from other educators and advocates. As the referenced article states;
“he showed the way, cajoling, nudging, encouraging, criticizing, as teachers struggled to integrate computers into their classrooms”. He, Bob Albrecht, and several others came together to create People’s Computer Company,
LeRoy Finkel’s work is easier to access than most because he published his work. Particularly, Technology Tools in the Information Age Classroom, a book that “is designed for use in an introductory, college level course on educational technology, and no prior experience with computers or computing”. When he published the book in 1991, most people knew of computers, but not about computers; yet, many were confronted with having to quickly become comfortable enough with them to incorporate the hardware, software, and topics into existing classes. LeRoy Finkel is one that led the way.
It is too late for this year (the deadline was mid-December), but there is a Fellowship Program in his honor that promotes leadership in the field of educational technology because the task continues. Know someone who fits that description? Pass along the word so they can apply for the next grant.
Thanks to iae-pedia and Computer-Using Educators for the background so far. Please pass along additional information so we can all expand the stories of the Pioneers.
The following is Delia Caban’s story. She is one of HCLE’s more recent volunteers and gets much of the credit for the improved design of the wiki. She, too, was involved in learning and computers, but from within an office.
Delia Caban’s Story
My name is Delia Caban. I’m working full time as a secretary for a Special Education Program. I love reading, gardening and researching for new projects. I love to challenge myself to learn and to discover how things works. I live in Puerto Rico.
I had an introduction to the computer’s world while finishing my degree at Interamerican University, and immediately fell in love with them. I worked with word processors. At that time if you made a command you had to press shift + F1 or F2, or + F5. For example: shift + F5 meant ask for the directory. When I started working, the company only had typewriters and my coworkers had never had contact with a computer. There was just one computer. I don’t remember the brand, but I do remember that the software was Wordperfect. I created many letters and tables in the new format to be use in the office.
It was in one corner of the office and everybody was scared to even touch it. Having a little experience with it, I immediately started to use it for letters and tables. Initially everybody was telling me that I was going to break it, but when they saw how easy it was to correct mistakes, to build tables, and to add colors and patterns to the paper they began to ask many questions, still without touching the computer. One by one, they started to fall in love with the computer.
We worked for the Department of Education and many times we had to do reports related to the schools, employees and students.
One by one they asked me to teach them. It was crazy!!! First it was easy because teaching one person at the time was easy, but then everybody stated to gather around and the office turn up side down!! The supervisor put me in charge of teaching all the employees (about ten). I had to do my job and help the others to learn how to use the computer at the same time. Every five seconds somebody called me because they made mistakes or because the computer showed a message. (The messages were in English but everybody was better at Spanish.) Believe me, it wasn’t easy; but I survived, and the best of all was that they learned.
The next year, the boss bought computers for all and the systems in the office changed dramatically. Everybody started to discover new functions and shared their discoveries with each other. We grew up together.
This happened by September 1993. There were only desktop computers and he decided to buy a more advanced model. He called many companies and they gave him a lot of advice about better systems for us. We didn’t know much about computers so we basically asked for a computer with a word processor. We learned by ourself mostly.
Once the computers began to be introduced to schools (about 6 years later) the Central Office decided to give training, including the teachers. (Later they received a laptop, but that is another story.)
In the Department of Education, even now, most of the jobs do not have a prerequisite of knowing how to use a computer; but if you don’t, you are going to have a very hard time doing the job. Mostly all the jobs are related to computers. We communicate through the computers and it is through the computer that we send information, reports and keep update the information of students and employees.
Delia’s story is illustrative of the informal nature of the interplay between computers and learning. The comment, “Initially everybody was telling me that I was going to break it”, is evidence of the fears people can develop around new things. Her reaction, which was to try anyway, is evidence of how individuals arise to lead others into and through change.
Kids fresh out of college are lucky. They don’t have to winnow through decades of experience when they are deciding which tool to use. The newest tech is as easy to learn as the heritage equipment, so when learn the old ways? Well, if the same old work is getting done, then the same old tools will be used – for a while. As a fresh kid graduating from college in 1980, it made more sense for me to learn how to use a computer than how to navigate office politics, even if it was just to get a letter typed.
We know the stereotypes from the 1980s. Computers lived in refrigerated rooms. Programming was done by punchcard. Graphs were plotted by hand, in pencil by the engineer, and then in ink by the tech aid upon approval of the lead or supervisor. Each group shared a secretary with the boss. She guarded his office and the typewriter. Of course the secretary wasn’t always a woman, and the boss wasn’t always a man, but that was the best bet.
Happenstance establishes habits. In my first week of work, everyone I was supposed to report to was on vacation. As a neophyte engineer I understood the theory behind my assignment, but I didn’t understand the process. I was handed long equations and piles of numbers and told to calculate the curves that would go on a graph. Here’s the pencil. Here’s the paper. Of course I had my own calculator and drafting equipment (two triangles, a french curve, an engineer’s rule, and an eraser.)
Making Data
I also knew where the “mini-computer” was. A PDP-11/70 was down the hall. I didn’t know how to run it either, but I could get an account, I knew FORTRAN, and was knew it would take less time to program the machine than to wear down the keys on my calculator.
There were no classes in how to run the computer; so, whenever I had a question I’d methodically start at the left side of the four-foot long rack of documentation and read until I had an answer. Indices helped. So did the sympathetic users.
When everyone returned from vacation, they encouraged me to use the old ways. If I wanted to use the computers I should use the mainframes which were run from punchcards. I was to write out what I wanted typed, hand the sheets to the data entry pool, wait for the cards, check them, and then submit the deck if necessary.
My handwriting was worse than my typing. I felt sorry for the keyboard operators. So, instead of typing commands into a file and submitting a RUN command, I made friends with the keyboard pool so I could type my own cards.
Eventually that looked silly enough that I was allowed to use the mini-computer and 9-track tapes, then a 300 baud modem, then eventually an internal computer network.
Making Words
Words were different, for them.
Whenever I had to write a memo, letter, or document I was required to write it by hand, submit it to the secretary, wait for her to type it, review the result, and repeat as necessary.
I type faster than I write and as I said, my writing isn’t very legible. I wasn’t allowed to use her typewriter, and I preferred to make less mess by typing; so I’d retreat to the computer room, a place my lead and supervisor rarely visited, and type my draft using the line editor (this is before copy&paste and WYSIWYG), print out the result, and hand it to the secretary.
Silly or not, the authorities wouldn’t challenge the secretary’s role.
Silly or not, this was happening to so many people that eventually someone started programming an unofficial word processing program.
Whether it was because of our efforts or not, the secretaries were provided with WANG word processors, computers designed for only that task. My response, well, they wouldn’t let me use her machine, but she was happy to have me help by fixing things on the screen rather than after she’d hit print. It wasn’t as efficient as possible, but it was better than the old way.
Making Graphs
Plotting data by hand is a valuable experience. There’s an intimacy with the results that is necessarily tangible. The process of inking a graph made it archival, yet was too tedious to be an efficient use of an engineer’s time. Technical aides were assigned the task of adding permanence to the results.
Plotting data by hand made sense when data was acquired in small packets. Airplanes were certified with data copied down by pilots glancing at their cockpit displays. As electronics improved and storage media shrunk it became possible to record data multiple times per second, and then to attempt to duplicate the flight in the flight simulator. The data task become overwhelming, especially when the real world data was to be compared to the computer’s results.
Retreat to the computer room again, and thank my friends who figured out how to make an electrostatic printer produce geometrically accurate plots by faking up a character set in their word processor. I still don’t know exactly how they did it. But plotting up computer results by hitting print was far more reliable than hand-plotting new curves from reams of data.
Breakthrough
Each of those battles challenged someone’s role: the engineer and data, the secretary and words, and the technical aide with graphs. Part of the resistance was a necessarily conservative approach to analyses affecting public safety. Part of the resistance was respect for established skills and preservation of livelihoods. Part of the resistance was challenge of authority because youth knew more than experience. Part of the resistance was simple human reluctance to change.
Each of those battles prepared the groundwork for the introduction of personal computers.
Personal computers were unproven. There were technical doubts that their numerical precision wasn’t sufficient. They were so small that they were considered toys and distractions. There was no internal support staff, so there was no authority figure to champion their introduction.
Reluctantly, the awareness of the activities of the younger engineers and aides convinced management to allow one PC, and it had to be an IBM, into each group.
Color like that came later, much later. Didn’t it?
If nothing else, it would free up time on the more expensive machines; so, it came across as a cost saving.
The real breakthrough though, was probably the fact that the well-paid supervisors were engineers too, and therefore curious. They bought PCs for home, and quietly asked the young engineers for advice about how to run them, and what to use them for. As capabilities increased and prices dropped, fears faded
I don’t recall any grand campaign, no great demonstration, that heralded the introduction of a new way to work. I can’t recall taking any classes about how to use any of the devices. I did write one of the first manuals for how to remotely use the flight simulator, saving two hours of travel time for each session, and easing the way for batch processing when piloted sessions weren’t necessary. Most of the effort was like that, personal, unofficial, and produced from having experienced the lack of more understandable support.
Battles continued. A bit of civil disobedience, or at least asking forgiveness instead of permission, helped bring laptops into the workspace. Trial programs with company supplied laptops were actually too early. The first one I used was an Osborne 1 (22 pounds and a 8.75 x 6.6 cm display. That’s 128 columns!!) The first one I used regularly was a PowerBook 170 that I bought and used against company directives (it wasn’t an IBM) because I was working from home and traveling. I was willing to spend thousands of dollars to save myself some time and make myself more efficient, even if the company disagreed.
Battles will continue, and I suspect in most cases it is not through concerted efforts, but through quiet persistence of innovative individuals who can see a better way to do things, and who won’t stop because someone said No.
My story, 1976, my freshman year at Virginia Tech. Welcome to computers. I’d never seen one, and now that I think about it, I didn’t even see one then. What I saw was a marvelous time of transition. As I recall, 1976 was the last year they offered a class in slide rule, the first year they required hand calculators for engineers, and an era when I could meet my foreign language credits by learning FORTRAN.
I learned how to use a slide rule in high school, a very nerdy thing to do. But college courses were suddenly abandoning slide rules in favor of hand calculators, particularly engineering hand calculators that could calculate exponents. In a nod to a time of transition, the school offered one last class in slide rule. It felt more like an homage to an era, where the instructor philosophized the perspective gained by noting the physical proximity of certain scales, and the accuracy actually required measured in an eyeball’s guess of a fraction of a millimeter. Yes, double precision on a mainframe was necessary for orbital mechanics, but the greater an engineer’s understanding of the basic physics, the easier it was to make very quick approximations without worries of batteries or bugs.
Within the years I attended achieving my bachelors, the calculator became such a powerful necessity that its use had to be restricted. From the first year where the college imposed minimums, eventually they had to impose upper limits to keep richer students from exploiting an unfair advantage. While working on my masters, the calculator was unfettered and it was possible for them to produce graphs and solve complex equations like matrices. Then the sly professors would create problems that took longer to solve if a student relied strictly on their calculator, but that could be solved quickly by inspection or with a simple equation. I’m glad I understood the basics.
In those years, almost all computing was done by cards. Days of my life were spent staring at rectangular holes in eighty column pieces of paper. Punch them in. Load them up. Run them through, then wait hours until the results arrived in a fanfold stack of paper in a mail slot. Oops. Missed a continuation character. Try again. Wait again. Hope to get it done in time for class.
When I finally stepped up and into my masters classes, we graduated to terminals. My brain had to be rewired to understand how the lines on the screen related to the holes in the non-existent paper. Much better. Then be amazed at being able to watch the program work its way through the queue and have the results displayed on the screen. No more need to clutter my room with green and white striped paper.
Except for the FORTRAN classes, everything was learned peer-to-peer, and by trial and error. The technology was almost as new to the professors as it was to us. We caught up quickly. Of course we slept less than the faculty and had greater incentive to learn if we were going to get our homework done on time. Everything was also remote. I know I used an IBM mainframe I knew which building it was in. I never saw it. I rarely even saw the printer.
It wasn’t until I graduated and got a job at Boeing that I became hands-on with hardware. From there it was PDPs and VAXs in person; Harris and Cray over 300 baud dial-up modems; and joining the bureaucratic fight to get PCs in the door and on our desks. But that’s another story.
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