Steve Jobs was a visionary and the co-founder of Apple Computers, whose innovations deeply impacted my education during the 1980s and 90s. The 80’s Apple IIs and the 1984 Macintosh with its personal computing industry-leading Graphical User Interface (GUI) – an applied technology attributed to an earlier Xerox control, which most people today would simply call “Windows”, though Microsoft didn’t release its GUI until 1985 – shaped my earliest, and most engaging memories of the technology used for education. This was not just mine, but many of my GenX cohort’s very first steps into our digital literacy (DL) journeys, and to a degree affected the way we learned in our youth, as teenagers and even today.
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Not only did Steven Jobs have a definite effect on how and with what many of us learn, he had profound ideas on education and on technologies place, within it. I’ll share a quote from a video Interview Steve did with the Computerworld Honors Program ‘s Oral History project he shared many thoughts on a variety of subjects (Jobs & Morrow, 1985, 15:40):
“I’ve helped with more computers in more schools than anybody else in the world and I am absolutely convinced that is by no means the most important thing. The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can. The elements of discovery are all around you. You don’t need a computer.”
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs, in another interview on an entirely different topic, shared a view of his, that possibly is the lens that we all should have when looking into educational technology in the classroom. He felt the Customer experience must come first, ahead of the technology; you define the customer experience and you design the technology afterward to provide the required experience (Jobs, 1997, 1:46). To me, this means designing our Learning experience for the customer – which is our students – pedagogically ahead of selecting the Teaching technology available to us to facilitate the experience. If the tech available can’t or isn’t able to support the experience, we should question “Why are we using it?”
References
Jobs, S., Morrow, G. (1985). The Steve Jobs 95 Interview unabridged [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Oxl5dAnR0
Jobs, S. (1997). Steve Jobs responds to criticism at WWDC 1997 [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=YgJJVifoKzwHnF-Z
Retro Recipes (Director). (2023, February 12). 4K Restoration: 1984 Super Bowl APPLE MACINTOSH Ad by Ridley Scott [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwS24cBZPc
Steve Jobs interview: One-on-one in 1995 – Computerworld. (2011). Retrieved September 18, 2024, from https://www.computerworld.com/article/1476597/steve-jobs-interview-one-on-one-in-1995.html
Images by Pixabay
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