Getting into data

I taught courses to both graduate and undergraduate education students about grading, testing, statistics and educational research methods.  I tried to use explicit grading based on clear standards of performance.  At the same time, personal computers were becoming available widely at prices that many people could afford.  

I had a duty of promoting the use of our campus computer that was rented for the express purpose of supporting faculty research with data analysis.  It was a time where I sometimes got asked by a professor "What is a computer?" People hadn't used one but they had heard of such a machine.  The situation was somewhat like the current one with AI (artificial intelligence).

My first experience with a computer involved developing a computer program in the computer language Fortran.  The computer was too large and expensive even to rent to have many.  We created a series of Fortran commands, each one punched in a separate card.  We handed our deck of cards to a clerk at a window and came back the next day to see the printed output.  It was tedious detailed work and often disappointing to see how our program had failed to do what we wanted.

It was a big deal in our household when we bought our first computer, an Apple IIe.  I wanted it at that time because I read that Apple had just started selling commercially made software for the machine.  The software consisted of a word processor, a spreadsheet and a simplified database.

It was so exciting when the printer printed out a sentence that I had just typed that I took the output to my wife's workplace to show her immediately!

That sort of work increased my sensitivity to what basis was being used to sort students, results, scores, etc.  It can be disorienting when one faces the many different ways that data can be derived, calculated and viewed.