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[ETUG 25] Flashback Friday – 1999

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 1999!
It’s 1999 and Heather Schneider from College of the Rockies is still serving as chair of ETUG. This year saw the creation of First Annual Innovation Awards in Educational Technology, with such categories as Tried and True, Bright and Shiny, and Hero of Support and Service Awards. These awards recognized individuals, teams, departments or institutions that clearly demonstrated achievements in the use of educational technology to improve teaching and learning for students.

Pop Culture

Hot Technology Trends

Some top stories from CNet for 1999:

  • Technological innovations and public offerings sparked heavy interest in Internet telephony. But even as its popularity begins to grow, making phone calls over the Net is still a novelty for most people.
  • Digital music promises to give consumers more flexibility and portability than vinyl albums, tapes or CDs ever did, but many obstacles still stand in the way of Net music’s widespread adoption.
  • Although start-ups and PC firms this year have touted technology that can network computers and other gadgets in a home, analysts say the new millennium probably won’t be the age of the Internet toaster.
  • Big data emerges as an important part of the internet in 1999. Eventually, the emergence of big data leads to the development of learning analytics, helping instructors identify and assist struggling students.  Fast forward to Educause’s 2016 Horizon Report, which describes learning analytics as “educational application of web analytics aimed at learner profiling, a process of gathering and analyzing details of individual student interactions in online learning activities.”

Workshop Location and Theme

Spring Camp ’99 was held on May 13 and May 14, 1999 at Simon Fraser University, Harbour Centre.  This year’s workshop focused on a general educational technology theme that provided educators with opportunities to network, attend workshops, tour labs, and demonstrations to discover how colleagues were using technology in an instructional setting. Workshop titles included an introduction to WebCT, Flash 3 Animation, Online Portfolio Development, and Video Conferencing: The Next Generation. A total of 182 people attended the very successful Spring Camp! (Check out the workshop offered by our very own Leva Lee, highlighted in red in the image below).

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