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Extinct tech you forgot existed

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21 pointsastdb24 comments

An iPad or PowerPoint may be more "sophisticated" than an overhead projector and dry wipe pen, but I'm not certain they are better.

(Actually now I wonder if there is a tablet application which faithfully replicates the overhead projector and roll of acetate experience?)

Not a tablet app, but there are "smart whiteboards" that do a nice job of combining showing things + scribbling/writing.

You probably want to have both though. I don’t want to sit in a lecture taking notes. But OHPs were great for worked examples and answering questions that needed diagrams.

Honestly I'd never remember a thing if I didn't take notes. I take notes even today, whenever I'm in meetings or presentations:

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2017/11/24/keeping-a-work-noteboo...

The best lectures I had at uni were some math lectures where the professor had an overhead with a transparency roll. He'd write on the transparency as if it was a blackboard, and could roll up and down as needed to review older equations or make room for new.

Blackboard worked well too, but not as good, since the professor could sit in front of the overhead so things lined up better, and the transparency pens had much better visibility than chalk on a (green) blackboard.

Most other lectures used PowerPoint, due to the professors being forced by the uni administration, but for me a PowerPoint lecture was barely worth the time. The information just wouldn't stick, since the PowerPoint format doesn't lend itself well to writing notes from, and without writing notes I hardly remembered anything.

The other factor is the pacing. If the lecturer is writing, on a transparency or blackboard, you can take notes at the same pace. PowerPoint allows stupid amounts of information to be delivered, which just washes over you--it's too much to transcribe, and too much to digest on the fly. Writing constrains the lecturer to delivering a reasonable amount of material, so that the participants can actually focus on it and retain it.

PowerPoint might be good for business proposals, sales and marketing, etc. But I personally think it's a travesty for educational use; there are few lectures I've attended which I found better for the unnecessary use of technology.

Yes, pacing is a huge factor. Written notes naturally lend themselves to be written, and with the professor writing them live, you usually have time to write them down and think about what you're writing as you go.

I caught many small mistakes, missing signs etc, while taking notes. I would not have caught that when looking at some slide.

I has a number of faculty who would print "slides" on acetate sheets to display using an overhead projector, they had the same potential for being overloaded.

It's possible to be a bad lecturer and use acetates. But physical constraints still act against it: they are bulky, you can't easily manage a lecture with 100 acetates, they have a tendency to slide onto the floor and make a jumbled mess, and they also cost money to make and take up physical space to store and move around.

While you can still abuse them, these factors limit how far you can take that abuse. PowerPoint knows no bounds.

I only used to print diagrams and figures onto acetates, leaving writing for the blackboard/whiteboard/blank acetates. You would use one or two for an entire session. I try to do the same with PowerPoint (well, Beamer), but some organisations increasingly mandate the whole thing be word for word on slides and stored in Blackboard for students to get. I find this wholly detrimental to the purpose of giving and attending a lecture, since it constrains the lecturer to this terrible presentation style.

I find pre-made slide formats like PowerPoint very difficult to pay attention to, both in an educational and workplace setting.

Overhead projectors that are written on while you are watching feel more interactive. I'm less likely to zone out or fall asleep when the content is actually being made in front of me, and can be changed dynamically based on questions from the audience.

One of the advantages of going digital is that you can distribute the slideshow files online.

I never wrote down any notes at university. My process was:

  - Review material on Moodle before lecture.
  - Go to lecture. Don't write anything.
  - Review material again on Moodle after lecture.

I don't know how you don't lose your notes, or have material missing from your notes because you were sick one day.

I wish I had a source, but I recall reading multiple studies that indicate your approach is preferable to writing tons of notes during the lecture. some keywords or doodles might work, but apparently furious note-taking is counter-productive.

Guess it depends heavily on classes. For the math oriented classes, I found taking notes from what the lecturer wrote on blackboard/overhead to be invaluable.

I very often did not have to look at the notes afterwards, but I _had_ to write them in order to remember. If I didn't write it down, I only recalled a fraction of it.

Of course, pacing is important, so that I could think about what was said and written, without having to overcommit to either. This is why PowerPoint doesn't work for me, as I have to chose to spend my mental capacity turning the PowerPoint into lecture notes, or listen. I can't seem to do both at the same time.

That's a good point. I find that my approach to programming lectures, for example, is quite different from my college days (psychology). And even then there was a difference between the 'typical' lectures and the ones on statistics and methodology.

This is the first site I've noticed using a 302 redirect to force people to use unencrypted connections:

curl -v https://www.bbc.com/future/gallery/20180816-do-you-recognise... .. * Connected to www.bbc.com (212.58.244.27) port 443 (#0) .. * SSL certificate verify ok. .. > GET /future/gallery/20180816-do-you-recognise-these-obsolete-technologies HTTP/1.1 > Host: www.bbc.com .. < HTTP/2 302 < content-type: text/html < date: Mon, 20 Aug 2018 10:44:09 GMT < location: http://www.bbc.com/future/gallery/20180816-do-you-recognise-... < content-length: 0

I wonder if they got the redirect configuration backwards...

It seems to be specific to certain pages. See here for one which redirects the other (normal) way: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45098190

The cassette tapes are still relatively popular in Germany. In my last trip into Saturn (a large retailer here in Germany), there had a good range of up-to-date music and audio books still for sale. However, most of titles are targeted towards to younger kids.

Do you have any idea what drives their enduring popularity in Germany in particular?

I think the main driver is the selection for kids.

Cassette players are quite sturdy things. Even if cassettes themselves are not as good as the players, they are still better than CDs.

Kids like to handle things, the haptic sensation is important, so you can't give them something with a touch screen early on (although that changes quickly with age).

I would be surprised if this is specific to Germany.

As a German my guess would be the kids market. A mixture between the reliability and indestructibility of tapes vs CD. Also it is very easy for young kids to understand the UX of a cassette player.

I was about to say "Teletext is not extinct!" which is true but then I pondered when I last time used it?

I was an avid user of Teletext in my teenage years and later on, using it daily to catch the news and look at the TV programme listing.

And that's why I use it much rarely nowadays. I don't watch regular TV anymore and thus have much less opportunities to quickly start up Teletext.

I read about a singer who still uses a childs cassette player to do their vocal warmups for the simple reason that it is bombproof: suitable for the mechanical demands of being on the road.

https://goo.gl/images/ZEoG6M

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