Welcome to the Lite Tech course. I
hope you find it useful.
The first thing I want to say is that I approach instructional
technology from the point of view of a user – someone wanting to make good
and immediate use of it in class – and not from the point of view of a technician.
That means I want to make as much use of it as fast as possible without having
to master entire programs. And you can do it!
There’s plenty of time for mastery, anyway, after getting
a few of the basics down!
In any case, let me introduce myself:
I teach English and mass communication at
I became interested in instructional technology in
the early 1990s, before EPCC even had any kind of Internet support for
students. That was, in fact, before even the World Wide Web caught on. We had a
technology genius here named Don Furth who decided to
bring the Freenet concept to
In the old days, everyone used only text browsers. It
was sure different from the way things are now. In any case, Don introduced
me to the Internet using a text browser. I thought I had seen the future,
and immediately started to figure out ways I could use it in my classes. I
did, and it was a blast. I eventually wrote a paper about it, and the school
was kind enough to send me to a conference in
At the Asian-Pacific Web Conference, I heard one of
the creators of the WWW speak. His name was Robert Cailliau.
He gave some fascinating figures about how the web exploded from 1994 to 1998,
the year of the conference. Those are available on a report I did for the
conference. They are worth looking at because they also show how really new
this phenomenon of the WWW is!
I hope you enjoy this short course. I have tried to
make it simple and straightforward, aiming it specifically at people who know
little about instructional technology. If there are things that are not clear
in the course, please be sure to post questions on the discussion threads. If I
– or your classmates! – can’t answer them immediately, I will try to find an
answer for you.
JO
Incidentally, I created this page in
Word and saved it as a web page. It is the simplest way to create a web page.
If you put the text in text blocks, you have a bit more control over where it
goes on the page. Even if you don’t want to bother with that, you can still
create a reasonable looking page by just putting text and pictures on a blank
Word page.