My First Computer Experience

Mainframe computer, originally uploaded by scriptingnews.

Hi There!

I’m Michael Haworth, I am an Information Technology 8 to 12 teacher at a distance education school in British Columbia. ETEC 540 is Course #7 for me, and I am really looking forward to it. My interest in this course was piqued, because often when we talk about technology, I believe we often forget about text and focus on all of the other bells and whistles that frequently accompany technology. When I create new online courses, I focus a considerable amount of time on trying to write high quality text that helps students, and I appreciate any further skill development that I can get in this field. Further, the books by Ong and Bolter look interesting and I am looking forward to learning and working with everyone in the course.

I chose this image because it represents my first personal experience with computers when I was in Grade 1 in 1975. Our Grade 1 class went on a field trip to a office building where they had a computer that looked similar to this one. I remember being in awe of this machine with the whirling tapes, flashing lights, card punch and teletype machine – it was like being in a holy shrine of technology! The text element of the computer and the field trip was that the class was able to take turns working on a teletype machine playing some sort of text adventure game where text commands were given to the computer and then it would type out what was happening in the game – I thought it was simply astounding. The people in the office also gave each student a computer punch card with our names punched out on it and a large sheet of computer paper with our name printed out in very large ASCII-based letters.

That computer experience stayed with me throughout my life and I believe that my fascination of computers eventually led me to my career as an Information Technology teacher. For me, technology has been a lifelong fascination.