• This site
    supported by:
  • BCcampus

[ETUG 25] Flashback Friday – 2001 + 2002

As ETUG celebrates 25 years, we are taking the opportunity every Friday to dig into our archives and celebrate our 25-year history. Today’s Flashback Friday heads back in time to the early 2000s.

It’s 2001….

The ETUG listsrv has grown to 390 members, and the Stewardship Chair of ETUG was Irwin DeVries. E-learning was a hot topic of discussion, with David Porter of the Open Learning Agency (now Executive Director of eCampus Ontario) moderating a special week-long discussion on e-learning on the ETUG listsrv.
There was no spring conference in 2001, but ETUG were in full presence at the spring Connections conference with sessions and a booth promoting ETUG.
58 people attended the fall workshop in November 2001 at Kwantlen University-College (now Kwantlen Polytechnic University).
In 2001, ETUG handed out four Innovation in Education Technology awards to members of the community.

  • The Hero of Support & Service: Mark Wagner (College of the Rockies)
  • Tried & True: Bryan Fair & team (BCIT)
  • Bright Shiny Object: Roger Mundell (Cedarlearning.com)
  • Adjudicator’s Award: Tony Bates and the UBC DE&T Team: Technology-based Distributed Learning Program

Award winners were encouraged to submit their projects to the Online Developers Exchange Network (ODEN), a repository of BC projects in the field of education technology, an early example of the sharing and collaborative nature of the BC post-sec edtech community.

It’s 2002….

Irwin DeVries returned as ETUG chair in 2002, and the spring conference also returned, May 9th & 10th, 2002 at the Justice Institute. 97 participants attended breakout sessions on  demo’s of accessibility tools JAWS and BOBBY & a discussion of accessibility issues in e-learning. Problem based learning was also a hot topic at the conference, as was anticipating the future with a session titled Ten Years On – what will Educational Technology look like in 2012?
The Fall conference returned to Kwantlen, with sessions on how to design group activities in online environments, learning objects and sharing materials, and reducing the impact of technological change. Bryan Fair from BCIT presented on testing he had done comparing WebCT to a new entry into the LMS space, Desire2Learn. And it was at the fall 2002 workshop in a session led by Randy Bruce that a brand new provincial organization being setup to support the BC post-secondary system called BCcampus was introduced.
In 2002, ETUG handed out four Innovation in Education Technology awards to members of the community.

  • The Hero of Support & Service: Mary O’Neil (Malaspina University College, now Vancouver Island University)
  • Tried & True: Chris Gratham & Al Hovden (Capilano College, now Capilano University)
  • Bright Shiny Object: Griff Richards, Marek Hatala, April Ng, and Timmy Eap (Technical University of British Columbia)

Pop Culture

Hot Technology Trends

Well, we did it…. we all survived the doom and gloom predictions of Y2K! As we shift into the early 2000s, here are some highlights:

  • 49% of U.S. households had sloooooooow internet, and the top website was AOL. Twenty-odd years ago the Internet was still mostly for play — Geocities was one of the most popular sites on the Web. Connecting to the internet meant using Dial-up. [Source: The Washington Post].
  • The world experienced the dot-com crash. Mega layoffs of programmers resulted in a general glut in the job market. University enrolment for computer-related degrees dropped noticeably. It was not uncommon to hear of unemployed programmers returning to school to become accountants or lawyers. [Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble]
  • In July 2001, we see the demise of Napster but the dawning of the file-sharing age.  After the July shut-down of the song-swapping platform, the file-sharing floodgates open sparking a wave of innovations that forever change how we obtain and experience music and video. [Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster]
  • The early 2000s were the Golden Age for instant messaging. Microsoft launches a new version of its instant chat software MSN Messenger. [Source: cnet.com]
  • The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started making its recorded lectures available to the public, free of charge, via its OpenCourseWare project, in 2002. [Source: opentextbc.ca]

Finally, this week ETUG Emeritus Bob Clark provides some of his memories from the early days of ETUG.

 

Written by