Personal History of Technology

  • Period: to

    Woodie Flowers class 2.70

    Woodie Flowers introduces Competitive Robotics in his class called 2.70 at MIT.
  • TV at home

    When I was very young, I remember having a TV at home. It had a remote control, it was in color, and we used an antenna to get ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and if we were lucky FOX. Later on we got cable TV.
  • LC II computer

    LC II computer
    The first computer we had was a Commadore 64, but the first computer with graphics was the LC II computer.
  • Sim City

    Sim City
    One of the first video games I saw on a computer was Sim City. One of my teachers had it on a computer at school.
  • Bulletin Board online

    My 6th grade teacher had a daughter that was going to college. She talked about using an online bulletin board to get information.
  • AOL

    AOL
    Even though there had been AOL for a while, we first subscribed to it in 1997. We did the hourly plans until the unlimited plans become available. We even had a 2nd phone line for it.
  • AV room at school

    Our school installed an Audio/Video room that students could use to take classes off campus while they stayed on campus. Very few students use it.
  • Napster lawsuit

    Napster was sued by Metallica stopping many people from downloading songs and burning them onto CDs.
  • Nokia phone

    Nokia phone
    The first cell phone I had was a Nokia phone with the snake game on it. It was a pretty durable phone, except when I had the phone in my bowling ball bag and I put my bowling ball on the phone. Of course I was sad that I couldn't play the snake game anymore!
  • College email

    When I started college communication was done via email with the school email address I was given. This was helpful when 9/11 happened and information about classes was distributed. It also made it easy to communicate with teachers for the classes.
  • Amazon

    Amazon
    When I was in college, I bought and sold textbooks on Amazon and bought and sold tickets on Ebay.
  • Facebook

    In the early days of Facebook, while I was attending KU, a friend mentioned joining Facebook. It has just opened up for students at major universities after only being available for students near Boston and Ivy League schools.
  • World of Warcraft

    World of Warcraft
    My brother-in-law and sister played World of Warcraft when I visited them. I started playing after watching the Southpark episode about it. I learned very quickly about how to use keyboard commands, use the mouse, connect to 3rd party sites, have a good internet connection, and many more skills such as communication and teamwork. One of the people I played with had a character in an expansion named after her.
  • iPhone 4

    iPhone 4
    This was the first smart phone I had.
  • Teaching Robotics

    After subbing in the Robotics class and seeming very interested in it, the teacher suggested that I take over for her so she could teach Science instead. The next year I started teaching it.
  • Driverless future video

    CNN 10 had a series about driverless cars. This was showing a brief overview of the potential for the future of driverless cars. Many of the topics are happening now and will probably happen very shortly.
  • AI

    When learning how to teach a remote summer technology camp through KSU, ChatGPT and other AI applications were being widely used. They demonstrated how to use Teachable Machine and the basics of AI.
  • Alef Aeronautics

    Alef Aeronautics
    Alef Aeronautics has permission to test out flying cars. Just last month they tested one flying over a SUV. They are scheduled to start selling them later this year.
  • Projection 2030 Education

    I see a major shift in how education is done. I am surprised that it didn't happen in 2020. It was probably because people were not ready for it yet and schools are not setup for a major shift. The shift would be doing individual learning while at school, and the teachers are mostly there to assist rather than creating and delivering content.