Tag: history

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My Own #25YearsOfEdTech

The EE208 Course Page in 1997

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.

EE208: Control Systems, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Swansea University, May 1997. Captured from the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine on 7th November 2020.

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!

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Swansea 2020 and Twitter

On Monday I attended the launch and first public lecture of the Swansea University’s centenary celebration Swansea 2020 and the launch of the Centenary Essays site.

At the lecture, Sam Blaxland, the historian appointed by the University to write the history of the University’s first 100 years, gave us an excellent overview of the highlights of that centenary and how he went about writing the book which will be released in June.

Twitter 1920?

On Wednesday, in the lead up to the LTHChat (wakelet), my Twitter colleague Simon Rae asked me how I thought the original academics who welcomed the first 80 odd students to enrol in 1920 might have viewed Twitter:

To which I replied:

https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/1220074148074020865

This led to this interesting conversation between Simon and Sam (tweeting as @Swansea2020) which I include in full:

Oral History and Podcasting

Sam’s approach to writing his history included the use of oral history and he has interviewed hundreds of people over the three-year project. He has adapted these skills further by hosting the University’s Exploring Global Problems Podcast an excellent series that is worth a listen!

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