The innovation which has transformed my professional life in recent years is the e-mail. At ADMC we faculty live and die by electronic mail. We send, every day, e-mails to people who are only a few desks away. In the past we would have gone to see these people in person or written hard copy notes to leave on their desks.
Electronic mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating the Internet. MIT first demonstrated the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961. It allowed multiple users to log into the IBM 7094 from remote dial-up terminals, and to store files online on disk. This new ability encouraged users to share information in new ways. E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Although the exact history is murky, among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail).
So e-mail has been around a long time but it is only in the last 10-15 years that it has played a part in my professional development.In fact, all aspects of life have been changed by e-mail. When I first went to Brunei (we landed in Bandar Seri Begawan, or BSB, the capital, on 1st January, 1980) there was no widely available worldwide web. No-one had a computer. E-mails were unheard of. There were no projectors in classrooms. There weren't even whiteboards or airconditioning units in classrooms. I used chalk on a blackboard. And this was in the Pusat Tingkatan Enam (Sixth Form Centre), at that time the leading academic institution in the whole country. We didn't even have air-conditioning in our staff room, and papers had to be weighted down on desks to prevent them being blown away by the fans.
The contrast with the situation here today in ADMC is striking. Every classroom has a/c, projectors, smartboards, whiteboards. http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/internet/. I can communicate with all my students by e-mail; getting them to check and read their e-mails is a different matter.
E-mails have transformed not just my professional life but all aspects of life in general. Increasingly people in their everyday lives, as well as their professional ones, are switching from old-fashioned letter writing to e-mail. It would appear to be an inexorable progression from hard to soft copy. When, in 1986, I was studying for my Licentiate Diploma in TESOL with Trinity College, London, (http://www.trinitycollege.co.uk/), I received work modules by airmail, and returned the completed work likewise. It would take weeks for work to arrive, be completed, returned to London, get marked and sent back. The same tasks could be completed today by e-mail in a fraction of the time. The world has been transformed by electronic mail.
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Bibliography:
"E-mail." En.wikipedia.org. http://www.google.com/. Web. 15 Nov. 2009.
"E-learning." www.admc.hct.ac.ae/internet. Web. 15 Nov. 2009.
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