{"id":265,"date":"2024-09-19T15:37:21","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T22:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru292\/?p=265"},"modified":"2024-09-19T15:37:22","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T22:37:22","slug":"steve-jobs-and-his-impact-on-educational-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru292\/steve-jobs-and-his-impact-on-educational-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Steve Jobs and His Impact on Educational Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2019s Apple IIs<\/a> and the 1984 Macintosh<\/a> with its personal computing industry-leading Graphical User Interface<\/a><\/em> (GUI) \u2013 an applied technology attributed to an earlier Xerox control, which most people today would simply call \u201cWindows<\/a><\/em>\u201d, though Microsoft didn\u2019t release its GUI until 1985 \u2013 shaped my earliest, and most engaging memories of the technology used for education. This was not just mine, but many of my GenX<\/a> cohort’s very first steps into our digital literacy<\/a> (DL) journeys, and to a degree affected the way we learned in our youth, as teenagers and even today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only did Steven Jobs have a definite effect on how and with what<\/em> many of us learn, he had profound ideas on education and on technologies place, within it. I\u2019ll share a quote from a video Interview Steve did with the Computerworld Honors Program ‘s Oral History<\/a> project he shared many thoughts on a variety of subjects (Jobs & Morrow, 1985, 15:40)<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI\u2019ve 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\u2019t need a computer.\u201d<\/p>\nSteve Jobs<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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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<\/a>). To me, this means designing our Learning<\/em> experience for the customer \u2013<\/a> which is our students \u2013 pedagogically ahead of selecting the Teaching<\/em> technology available to us to facilitate the experience. If the tech available can’t or isn\u2019t able to support the experience, we should question \u201cWhy are we using it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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