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I have been using computers for most of my life yet I am still surprised at times by the concept of ‘retro’ computing. To me technology always still seems to be something new and I’m always on the look out for innovations and creative ideas. I guess this focusing on the new and the futuristic has blinded me to the history of computing and that may be why I’m surprised by the retro!
I am led to wonder though what the deal is with this ‘retro’ stuff. Is it simply a hankering for olden times when computing seemed simpler? Is it just a marketing ploy to try to make more money out of old ideas? Is it maybe a sign that we’re running out of new ideas and so turn to the old? Or is my inner cynic right to think that it costs so much to develop new ideas that developers repackage old ones as a cheaper alternative? Well, I guess any one of those reasons could be right, at least in part, but does ‘retro’ serve any useful purpose?
In educational technology, we are not immune from the ‘retro’ movement. In the past, I have seen companies repackage old BBC Micro programs for the PC and I even had one company want to repackage my old ‘Young Start” suite of programs. In the past, I’ve teased Terry Freedman about his use of the Livescribe pen which combines written notes with a laptop. I too have also been bitten by the retro bug and have been known to enthuse excitedly about the return of Bigtrak.
Even the ultra-trendy Mac computer is not immune to a bit of retro computing, it would seem. Announced at Macworld last year and with a new version for education announced this year, Papershow seems to bring to your mac a pen tool similar to Livescribe. Even Livescribe themselves have not been sitting still and have made available their newer Echo version of the livescribe pen.
The biggest and most pervasive example of retro computing is possibly the interactive whiteboard and projector.
The data projector really dates back to the slide projector or cine projector we used to have back in the early 1960s; it really is a dinosaur of technology and one that refuses to become extinct despite progress in display technology. It is, though, its partner, the Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) to which I wish to turn in order to illustrate the possible usefulness of retro computing.
Why, though, do I class IWBs as ‘retro’ computing, after all we didn’t have them back in the 1980s? Well, at a time when computing was moving schooling away from the teacher and the blackboard with its chalk and rubber (or the whiteboard and its marker pens), the interactive whiteboard took it right back there again. I don’t want to dwell on the well worn arguments as to the usefulness or otherwise of IWBs, whether they are a good thing or a bad thing, or whether they took educational technology forwards or backwards.
I see IWBs as linking technology to existing practice. In other words, they took a technique or skill teachers were used to (writing and presenting on a board at the front of the class) and applied that to technology, or vice versa. Regardless of whether this is good practice or not, it brought technology to a wider range of teachers, many of whom will have since gone on to explore and use other technologies and other ways of using technology in education. This is an illustration of the power, or influence, of retro technology; it relates technology to existing practice and allows users to explore technology further and build upon their practice.
This is often far more effective than introducing something completely new to people and telling them they have to stop what they’re doing or how they’re doing it and do it a different way. By using technology that has a degree of familiarity, users are more accepting of it and perhaps more willing to explore new ways of using it; often leading themselves into changing the way in which they work.So while we may scoff or tease at things ‘retro’, let’s not forget that they may be a path to newer things.
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