In his 25 years at Drury University, Gary Swadley, the director of the Technology Services Department, has seen a lot of change.
He took the time to sit down and discuss the past, present, and future of technology on campus with The Scoop.
1990: The early days of processing
Pulling from a 1983 Drury newspaper article, we discussed one of the first word processors called AceWriter.
“This article is talking about how much time this AceWriter, which is a software package basically like Microsoft Word, … would save you,” Swadley says. “You wouldn’t have to retype a paper if you had something that you needed to change, add, or any kind of edit. At the time, your only option was to go back and retype an entire paper.”
Swadley remembered what he saw as one of the biggest weaknesses of the university campus at the time.
“When I got to Drury, there was no campus network at all. There was no Internet, at least available to the public. We were among the first in Springfield to have a direct connection to the Internet. … In 1993, we got a grant from the National Science Foundation to connect to the Internet, and it was mostly text-based at that point. You could get pictures on there, but certainly no multimedia. The Web interface was just really clunky.”
Getting on the Internet was only the start, though, as the campus was not prepared from a hardware standpoint for public Internet usage.
“None of the buildings had network connections,” he remembers. “You have buildings like Burnham and Pearsons that are really old and have 18-inch interior brick walls that you have to go through. So running the cabling was not easy. … It was a huge project.”
The project cost $248,000, Swadley said. After the classrooms were networked in 1994, the campus connected the dorms a year later.
1993: the technological prowess of Olin Library
“Olin is kind of our hub — that is where all the fiber goes to on campus. That was a really high-tech place at the time. … We had high definition video [not the HD of today]. … We had some Macs and PCs, but there were some things there that were pretty ahead of their time. We had voice recognition, so you could do a little bit of voice command …, and that was really where we had our first projector.”
Swadley also had a pamphlet from the opening of the library that highlighted some more of its cutting-edge technology: A color scanner, Windows 3.1, and a 12-foot satellite dish mounted on the roof that was used to receive broadcasts and presentations at a price.
Changes in student technology
“There were times when it was unusual for a student to even bring a computer to campus. Then we got to where it was common, and then it probably got to a point were almost every student brought a computer,” Swadley says.
“But now, every student has an average of three or four devices that they have that are on the wireless network: smartphones, tablets, laptops, game consoles, and all kinds of things. We have gone from most students not having any sort of network device to them having several.”
Changes in educational technology
In 1985, the campus had about five computers. By 1990, that number had risen to 125. The Breech School of Business Administration had a major lab containing computers with dual floppy-disk drives. “Students would have to check out a word-processing floppy and then another floppy that they would save on,” he recalls.
When asked if those were Drury’s first flash drives, Swadley laughed and had this to say:
“Yeah, that is right. They held 1½ megabytes of data. Breech was used really heavily, and the students really seemed to love it.”
The future: Faster and smaller
“I have seen a lot of changes, but there have been some things that have been consistent about the change: technology keeps getting more powerful, faster, and smaller. So I think those things you could pretty much bank on staying with that same trajectory. That means that the next step, and we are kind of seeing this now, is that tablets will be as powerful as laptops and desktops.”
Is this a push toward a mobile-oriented society?
“So yes, mobile, and then from the tablet to the smartphone. Then maybe even to wearables on your wrist or in your clothing.”
Drury is reviewing several new technologies for the future. For example, the university is looking at Lecture Capture, which would allow all lectures and lessons to be recorded and available online. All of the speech from the lecture would also be converted into text, allowing students to review a class transcript to find something in particular without having to search through an entire video.
