Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/47623
technology A Tech Retrospective BizEd's first issues offer a snapshot of how business education got from "then" to "now." REMEMBER THE GOREADER, an electronic device that promised to make textbooks obsolete? How about the Palm Pilot? Or even the term "handheld computer"? A decade ago, BizEd's Technology department covered these devices as the state-of-the-art in education. While they may have disappeared, they were the precursors for technologies that would redefine education. Many other trends that our Technology department featured in BizEd's first few issues had more staying power: E-readers. In BizEd's inaugural November/Decem- ber 2001 issue, the article "No More Pencils, No More Books" touted the functionality of the aforementioned goReader, a 10.4-inch tall device that could hold up to 65 textbooks in its memory. Students could use a special stylus to take notes, highlight passages, and cut and paste text to an electronic clipboard. The cost? Just $900. The only thing that goReader's creators needed was for publishers to supply the e-books. Unfortunately, the goReader was about six years ahead of its time. Publishers weren't ready to release electronic textbooks, and students didn't have $900 to spare. The goReader quietly disappeared. But it helped prepare the market for its successors. Amazon released the original Kindle in 2007; Apple released the iPad in 2010. Open source computing. In March/April 2002, BizEd discussed open source software—free software, such as the operating system Linux, that allowed its computer code to be altered by anyone. At the time, the concept was being heavily promoted by IBM and Sun Micro- systems. "We're evolving from the PC model, so that devices students use to access information are not neces- sarily PCs," said John Tuohy, then Sun's higher educa- tion marketing manager. "Open source software can be downloaded once, and then run from any station." In many respects, the open-source concept predated the idea of cloud computing, in which clients use appli- cations and store data with companies on remote serv- ers, via the Internet, rather than on their own comput- ers. In the "cloud," users can access tools for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, and collaboration. Free application suites that include these functions, such as 74 November/December 2011 BizEd Google Apps for Education, have become mainstays in many business classrooms. E-learning. In July/August 2002, BizEd pub- lished "Setting the Standards for E-Learning," which explored how educators were still struggling to dis- cover how to maximize e-learning's effectiveness. "Adding and editing content is now much easier than it was in the early days," said Kristi Emerson, then public relations manager for eCollege, an e-learning platform now owned by Pearson. Even so, she and others quoted in the article noted that professors still wanted a greater level of interactivity. The article also mentioned that the "holy grail" of e-learning would be the ability to customize learning experiences so that students could learn at their own speed and competency levels. "To believe that the sum product of the Internet and e-learning has already been invented would be naïve," said Robert Pittinsky, chair and co-founder of Blackboard. Pittinsky wasn't kidding. Friendster, the precursor to MySpace, had only just been created that year. Facebook started finding friends in 2004. Today, customization and interactivity are at the heart of most schools' online educational programs, which they facilitate through collaboration tools and the universe of social media, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Handheld devices. That same issue included "Hand- helds Come to Campus," which focused on the utility of the Palm Pilot for polling students in the classroom. At the time, Palm Inc. had provided 40 Palm Pilots to the Bryan School of Business and Economics at the Univer- sity of North Carolina at Greensboro. Each Palm Pilot was loaded with LearnTrac, polling software created by eLearning Dynamics of Washington, D.C. "LearnTrac will replace many of the things we do and help us to do some things differently," a Bryan School professor said.