Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Off to Claremont ...

I'm cleaning off my desk to head out to a 3:30 meeting and then on the road east to the Claremont School of Theology (my alma mater!) for the Theology After Google conference beginning this evening and continuing through Friday.

I'm imagining that a conference on connectivity will be "wired" so hopefully I'll get to do some writing while I'm out there, but I've been sitting here thinking a little about how much has changed since I was a Claremont student (1993-96).

I was remembering how while I was a student there, we made the shift from the 3x5 Dewey Decimal Library card catalogue to library resources IN A DATABASE.

The only students who were "wired" were the ones who'd had too much caffeine before class.

And when it came time to take GOEs (the General Ordination Exams) some of us had word processors (I used something called a "Leading Edge"... remember them?) but others typed the exam out on their IBM Selectrics.

What a difference a decade and a half makes! More to come!

1 comment:

uffda51 said...

My uncle studied world religions with Robert Hutchins (of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions fame) at the University of Chicago in the 1940s. Hutchins suggested that my uncle use 3x5 index cards to organize his research. He‘s well past 300,000 cards, and counting. He also hasn’t been able to use his garage for decades.