History of Computing within the College of Business

by Dave Sullivan

History moves quickly in the computer field—each "generation" of personal computers lasts about three years. Given this sort of relentless change, it becomes critical to understand the progression of technology and make reasonable predictions about what the future will bring.

We all need to rethink how we communicate. Everyone is familiar with face-to-face communication and print media. These methods work reliably and have been the historical backbone of education at all levels—from kindergarten through doctoral programs. I can't blame anyone who has a knee-jerk reaction against shifting away from such time-honored methods of interacting. On the other hand, as computers keep getting faster, cheaper, and better, they become useful in more and more settings. Because people don't like change, the conversion from one method of operating to another is unsettling. Face-to-face communication and printed documents will remain important, but in many settings, we should adopt newer, better methods.

The importance of rethinking our activities becomes clearer when we look through a historical perspective. Think about the implications of the photo at the right. It shows students at Oregon Agricultural College (since renamed Oregon State University) learning to use high-tech equipment in 1911.

Although I was hired at Oregon State University in 1981, I still think of myself as a young man. But my body has started to creak, and I now find myself a senior faculty member. So I suppose it is appropriate for me to discuss where we stand in an historical context. I have seen our introductory computing classes go through four milestones.

Prior to my arrival in 1981, students learned to program in Fortran with punched cards. But in Fall term 1981, the College began teaching students to enter Basic programs directly into a mainframe computer. At that time, the College required students to study programming even though students were unlikely to use the skill after graduation. The faculty thought the study of step-by-step programming logic was good for its own sake—like Castor oil or physical education.

The next shift occurred around 1985 when the College set up a personal computer lab to teach about word processing and spreadsheets. This shift was more controversial than it might seem today. I remember a University Computer Committee meeting at which the computer center's director pounded the table red-faced when I argued against buying another mainframe computer so we could buy PCs instead. More locally, the college faculty discussed extensively whether to continue teaching programming, and eventually decided to drop the requirement.

Fall 1994 brought two innovations: students received storage locations on our network, and we installed the college's first web server. We probably were the first Business College in the nation to require all students to build web pages. Without much public discussion, I simply stuck this material in the required BA271 course. For whatever it is worth, to the best of my knowledge, no one in the College of Business had built a web page prior to the summer of 1994.

More than the other milestones, this change represented a unique historic shift. Never before had it been possible to publish an idea worldwide at the touch of a button.

In the last couple of years, for the first time I had all necessary tools to shift from batch-oriented, lecture-based teaching to on-demand learning. This means I can now package instruction to play back at a student's convenience. All student work in my classes—exams and assignments—is turned in electronically or harvested automatically, and most feedback is returned through personalized email messages. The only real downside that I have noticed is the loss of textbook royalties. I no longer need a publisher to package my ideas for distribution, and as a consequence, people no longer pay to read my thoughts.

Unlike the other milestones, no single tool or invention has driven this shift. Instead, a whole collection of programs and networking improvements now work together and allow new ways of exchanging ideas. Part of this shift is driven by better reliability and availability of networked computers, part by better software tools, but a large part comes from learning better ways to provide information interactively.

As enthusiastic as I am about the new techniques, they face large obstacles:

• Instructors can no longer rely on the next edition of "the textbook" to "cover the material." Publishers have no clue how to charge for ideas exchanged through networks, so they continue to push "cram-and-flush" models of learning.
• Many tools for exchanging information through networks are brand new, and they vary widely in ease of use and reliability. For example, the video files that we have recorded for these classes are too large to download and play reliably outside of Bexell Hall.
• Just as opinions were divided in 1985 about whether to replace mainframe computers with PCs, opinions remain split about whether to replace traditional methods of communication with electronic ones. Some people feel comfortable judging intellectual prowess only by counting paper-based articles. Similarly, the traditional way of measuring teaching loads has been to count lecture periods. Thus, if I spend my time building instructional websites and video files, I am likely to receive unsatisfactory performance reviews from administrators who count publications in printed academic journals.

Given all these obstacles, why am I optimistic? The College of Business is in a wonderful position to take full advantage of this most recent milestone. Gwen Wolfram, the college's Information Services manager, and his support crew have done an excellent job of putting together a reliable network with state-of-the-art software. The Information Systems faculty—James Coakley, V. T. Raja, Bill Robinson, Rene Reitsma, Ray Tanner, and I—are committed to packing our courses with cutting-edge knowledge and activities. Finally, except for the last couple of years because of the Dot.com implosion, the response from the job market has been truly uplifting. Students that graduate with good computer skills are at a premium in the job market.

Change necessarily involves turmoil. Since I am changing this course as rapidly as I can in an attempt to keep up with the industry and new software tools, you should expect some assignments to have flaws. The alternative would be undoubtedly worse: I could still be asking students to learn about programming.

Finally, if you would like to read more about the College's long and rich history, I wrote the last definitive historical overview of the College of Business.
 

This link will take you to the beginning of the Midterm exam.

This website was created and is maintained by Dave Sullivan.
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