More (or less) original insights from an old blogger
Hugo is a static web generator written in Go. I’m thinking of exporting this WordPress site to Hugo so that all the posts, pages and assets are text, easily version controlled and ready for writing as I transition from academia to private life.
I’ll keep notes on the process and post them in the new Hugo site.
Yesterday, I received my copy of Martin Weller’s book 25 Years of Ed Tech. Inspired by Chapter 2 The Web (1995), I travelled back in time to my own first attempt to teach online. I visited the Way Back Machine (web.archive.org) to discover that the first official University website (www.swan.ac.uk) was archived on 11th December 1997.
Navigating through that web site, I discovered that the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering website (which I built) was archived a few months earlier. I also rediscovered that I had published a potted history of the Electronic and Electrical Engineering web site on this blog.
In the spirit of celebrating my own 35-year career in teaching, I looked back at my own first attempt at e-learning. And here is my web site for EE208: Control Systems, circa May 1997.
The course notes were created using LaTex2HTML, but unfortunately, the images and the mathematics, which was presented using images, have rotted in the archive. Today I use Markdown for my lecture notes, and MathJax for math generation, but the technology that delivers my content to students still web-based.
So for me, like most ed-tech folks, the key technology in my teaching career has been the World Wide Web. The difference now, for most of us, is that we don’t need to know that!
I am old enough to remember the Sun newspaper’s 1992 splash “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights” published on polling day for the 1992 General election. They repeated the same trick, and the same headline, with Ed Milliband in 2015.
On Friday 13th 2019, having been shocked at yesterday’s exit poll predicting the largest Conservative party majority since 1983, and being dismayed on waking this morning find out that it was true, I think that I will soon be leaving Britain and turning out the lights.
Since June 2016, Britain’s have sleep-walked towards the disaster that is Brexit. Resistance has been futile. We have been assimilated. But, I have an exit plan. I am married to a German. A European citizen who has lived in Wales for 34 years, paid her taxes, contributed to the local economy, been a good citizen. Who has been made, like many EU citizens settled here, to feel unwelcome and has had no say any of this! She’s been aching to go home for three years. In the meantime, I’ve been hanging on and hoping that the nightmare would end, that sense would prevail, that the nation would realize that revoking article 50 was actually the only sensible way out of the mess we’d got ourselves into!
Instead, Britain has voted for Boris Johnson. The joke candidate. The guy who hides in a fridge to avoid an unscripted interview. It’s Boris’s face that should have been on that light bulb. And now it is.
I am lucky. I can migrate to Germany and be welcomed as mywife’s partner. Five years from now I can be a German citizen, and an EU citizen again.
I will enjoy my retirement. Chewing the fat at an ex-pat Stammtisch in my local pub in, in Berlin, that city that used to be physically divided by a wall. I’ll be able to watch as Britain’s inevitable decline is described by bemused eyebrow-raised moderators on Tagesschau. As Scotland becomes independent; as Ireland reunites; and as Wales goes down the toilet, a forgotten, neglected, vassal state of a nationalist, nasty England.
I thought my retirement and emigration was a few years away yet. Today, it looks like it’s only a matter of weeks.
