A Time of Magic

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

If you can cast your mind back to the 1960s one of the “big things” of the time was “programmed learning”.

A programmed learning course was a variant of a correspondence course in that you did it largely by yourself. Where it was different was that you could also do the marking ie no tutor needed to be involved.

Now the big plus point of this was that without the tutor, the courses were much cheaper and could even be sold in bookshops as they simply consisted of a series of workbooks with the answers at the back. How they worked sounds exactly how many DVD based courses work today. You went through a series of questions, then checked the answers; if they were correct, you went on to the next session and if they weren’t the book directed you to a revision of the concepts and went over it again.

Although you can get the descendants of this type of course today, we don’t use the phrase “programmed learning” because it got a very bad press at the time. Most importantly, it was felt that the technique would only work for fairly simple subjects and, to be fair, it does work best when there is a straight yes/no response.

That all changed with the launch of the Open University in the UK which started teaching the worlds first distance learning courses in 1971 after several years of preparations.

Things have obviously changed a lot since then and now similar universities exist in all the major countries of the world and together they teach just about every subject you could imagine. And then some. To be fair, there is tutor feedback in the majority of these courses but at its heart it’s still the programmed learning approach from the 1960s and before but applied to courses at a much higher level.

In fact, so much work goes into perfecting their courses that in many instances it’s actually better to study with them than it is at a conventional university: In 2004 The Sunday Times Universities Guide said “Just four institutions — Cambridge, Loughborough, York and the LSE — have a better teaching record than the OU” which is pretty amazing.

Interestingly, the Open University has been given top ranks in 19 very different subjects: Business and management; chemistry; classics and ancient history; economics; education; general engineering; geography; geology; molecular biosciences; music; organismal biosciences; philosophy; physics and astronomy; politics; psychology; social policy and administration; sociology; subjects allied to medicine; theology and religious studies which, of course, includes some rather heavy-weight topics.

In the run up to the Year 2000, panic was in the air as to what would happen if the computers around the world went AWOL at the stroke of midnight on December 31st 1999, yet nothing really happened, so what was all the panic about?

The panic really started in the mid-1990s as some computer systems needed to refer to dates in the 21st century and people discovered that they couldn’t as the dates were all held with only two digits. The net effect of holding the year as two digits was that, for the most part, the computer treated dates that should have been in the 21st century as though they were instead in the 20th century so 01 was 1901 and not 2001 for instance. Naturally, as 2000 approached more and more computer systems were hit with this problem and, eventually, this reached the attention of “the authorities” who duly hit the panic button.

Interestingly though 2000 is a special year as it is a leap year because it’s divisible by 400. In fact, the first problem with computers hit in 1900 because the guys writing Lotus 123 assumed that 1900 was a leapyear therefore you can have the 29th of February 1900 in Lotus spreadsheets (and indeed many others as for compatibility that mistake needed to be replicated). Since 2000 was a leapyear, things like video recorders were fine with two digit years as were most consumer electronic devices.

However, 2100 will be quite a different matter. On the offchance, that you are still using your somewhat obsolete 20th century video recorder at that point, it’ll let you have a February 29th when it shouldn’t. You might think that 2100 is a very long time from now but actually the first problem crops up in 2038 when Unix has a problem with dates and seeing as Unix is pretty prevalent you can probably look forward to a similar Y2K panic around then.

But why was 2000 something of a non-event? Simple really: thousands of programmers all around the world were working on fixing the problems with all the software in the run-up to it. Things did happen though: if you had your eye on the ATMs you may have noticed that a lot of them were rebooted a few minutes before midnight for example.

Mass tourism is a surprisingly recent development and really only got going with the arrival of cheap package tours in the 1960s. Before that, the common man just hadn’t got the cash to go anywhere more exotic than Blackpool.

All that changed rapidly of course with the arrival of charter flights and the consequent dramatic drop in the prices for foreign holidays. The first place to really benefit in a big way was, of course, southern Spain which at that time was quite a series of fairly poor agricultural communities; not anymore, of course.

In many ways it didn’t really matter what the place you went to was so long as it was sunny and the majority of the early package holidays simply promoted sun, sand and sea as the attraction. With that, there wasn’t much of a need for guidebooks and indeed it was into the 1980s before the main guidebook series really got into their stride.

Today, of course, just about every location in the world has several guidebooks covering it but even as late as 1978 the range was incredibly limited. At that time by far the best for America was the Lets’ Go series, produced by and aimed at the student market because that was the only group that had the time to go on an extended holiday to America at the time. Even in 1980 a trip to America from Europe was definitely in the category of “once in a lifetime” yet nowadays it’s commonplace.

But surely the Internet is better? Not really. The majority of websites that write about a particular place do it in a very sketchy manner compared to the coverage that you’ll get of the same place in a good guidebook. I was very surprised for instance to find that there was no site with decent coverage of Cordoba when writing the article for that for Whole Earth Guide.