Mr. Backup

I just found out last night that my friend of more than 30 years was sometimes called "Mr. Backup" by his wife.  That is impressive because my wife often calls me the same thing.  He and I share many characteristics, even though he comes from a Great Plains ranching family and I come from a mixed bag of farmers and urban workers from the east coast.  We are both interested in good communication and we both see the potential for big enhancements for education and communication in modern technologies.  

For more than 30 years, he taught college students preparing teachers how to use instructional technology in their classrooms.  I taught courses having to do with research methods, including statistics, which can be said to be a major force in the development of modern American  personal computing.  We both like technology but from the human use side, not the deeply technical electrons and amps side.

He did his dissertation on use of visual technology in an emotional/persuasive project against smoking.  I did mine on a game setting that could be used for studying and training workers in slippery executive positions, such as school principals.  I had trouble getting published and so had trouble getting promoted but when I made a series of tv programs on basic statistics that was, and still is, broadcast over the whole state, that was enough to merit promotion.  I was impressed when he sought promotion because he had a wire, two-wheeled shopping cart full of educational materials: tapes, slide presentations he had written, created, narrated.  As an education undergraduate major, I was very disappointed by the poverty of real information in my teaching courses.  As a lifelong reader of all sorts of writings, I knew that many books by, say, C.S. Lewis, and movies about, say, Lassie, were many times as evocative as the journals I learned to examine in grad school.  So, when his cart full of carefully designed educational audio-visual materials puzzled and flummoxed campus administrators, I felt I was once again seeing formality and tradition win over brains and imagination.

He has spent his whole life working with computers and introducing people to their potential.  When I got my first job as an assistant professor of education, I was asked by the administration to be the part-time director of academic computing.  The campus had an expensive computer for the professors to use but very few people knew what to do with it.  After 18 months, too much of the electron/amps side made me withdraw back into teacher training alone.

We both like back-ups because we know that modern, speedy, internet communication is fragile and depends on the cooperation and interaction of many people and technical systems.  It is easy for nature to disrupt our production and distribution of electricity, low-error communication codes or the bodies, eyes, hands, brains, muscles, bones that compose, send, receive and appreciate our messages.

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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety