Cockeyed Optimist

When I returned from my sabbatical in England (I had resigned from Mechanical Engineering, ready to take up my appointment at the newly-established Tertiary Education Institute. I was, in fact, the third member of staff, after Professor Ernest Roe, the founding Director, and his secretary (whose name I forget, she wasn’t to stay there very long).

We occupied what had been a private house, adjacent to the campus at St. Lucia, but separate from it. I think my office had been the master bedroom, and Professor Roe’s office the lounge. The kitchen still existed, as a kitchen cum duplicator room.

At that time, in 1974, there was a school of thought that held that there were audiovisual solutions to most educational problems. So the garage of the Tertiary Education Institute house had been turned into a practice studio, with examples of many pieces of audiovisual equipment, ranging from simple devices like audio tape-recorders and slide projectors to complicated combinations of components. Computers were beginning to take their place too, but since there were no personal computers yet, the computer-aided learning was all extremely expensive and based on huge main-frame computers.

But, before we could get properly settled in we were hit by the Great Brisbane Flood of January 1974. We were living on the south side of the Brisbane River at that time, in a house we had just had built. Within a day or so of the rain starting, our suburb, Jindalee, was completely surrounded by floodwater. Fortunately, our new house was on a rise, so the water just touched the very bottom of our back garden. We could see the house we had lived in before we built - at least, we could see the top of its roof and the chimney! At the peak of the flood we had three-and-a-half families living in our house, as we took in neighbours whose houses had gone under.

We had no electricity, so before very long we had to bury the load of meat we had in the freezer - a full side of beef in joints. And we had bread and milk delivered by helicopter or boat. Jindalee was joined to the rest of Brisbane by the Centenary Bridge spanning the Brisbane River. At some point at the height of the flood, a large barge drifted into the bridge and damaged it. When the water subsided enough to use the bridge, we were confined to one lane only, while they repaired the damage. We got used over the next few months to lengthy delays as we queued to cross in the mornings and evenings.

When the water first started to go down, we pitched in and helped those people who had their houses submerged. I remember, with a neighbour, helping to clean up a house owned by an elderly couple. They were so traumatised that all they could think to do was make an endless succession of cups of tea, while we tried to clear up. Their next-door neighbours had had an old delelict car in their yard, and the flood had carried a layer of black sump oil through the old folks’ home, so there was a greasy tide-mark all through the interior.

But the most touching thing was that they had both, I think, been music teachers, so they had a grand piano, which was, of course badly damaged by the water, but not as badly as a ‘cello and a couple of violins, which had disintegrated into their component parts.

When we got ourselves sorted out, I went back to work at the University, which had suffered too, but only on the low-lying part of the campus, fortunately. Our Director, Professor Roe was living in a typical Brisbame ‘high house’, raised on stumps, but it was down close to the river, so the water had actually reached a metre or so into the top floor, where all the living rooms and bedrooms were.

And then we rejoined our colleagues. I had another colleague, Geoff Isaacs, who had been appointed at the same time as me, but had not been able to start straight away, because of some medical procedures he needed, so he had stayed in Sydney and missed the joys of the flood. He and his wife had to live in one of the university colleges for a while, because there was an extreme shortage of accommodation in Brisbane, pending repairs to all the houses that had gone under.

In the early days of TEDI (as the Tertiary EDucation Institute became known), we were all very keen on the potential of videotape. We had a portable (sort of!) reel-to-reel setup that we could lug round to classrooms so we could tape a class for the lecturer to view later. This was a valuable learning experience for academics. (See this account from UC Berkeley.) At that time, there were two main formats in contention for video-cassette players, VHS, which eventually was the winner, and Sony Beta. There was also an attempt by Phillips to get into the act, and their distributors contacted TEDI to arrange a series of demonstrations, hoping of course to sell the equipment to many departments around the University. So I and my colleagues arranged sessions with several academics in a range of departments, and the Phillips technicians brought the gear in for us.

I remember some language-teaching lessons being done - little playlets on booking into a hotel in France, and that sort of thing; an operation on a horse at the Veterinary School; some instruction in the proper ways of brushing your teeth from a couple of Dentistry lecturers; and, most memorably, an operation at Royal Brisbane hospital. We, most of the equipment and the technician were unsterile, so we were packed into a little observation room off the operating theatre, while the camera and an operator were scrubbed-up sufficiently to be allowed inside. It was so effective at showing the details of the operation that the Phillips guy running the VCR had to excuse himself and left me to run the show. The only reason I didn’t join him was that I was too busy with the equipment!

The boom in audiovisual teaching was supplanted after a while, when the personal computer started to become popular. I had been fairly early to take up this new enthusiasm; I got my Apple ][ in 1978, I think, one of the first in Brisbane, and so I was quite keen on computer-aided learning. I spent a sabbatical in Canada, in London, Ontario on a CAL project in 1984 — I might write about my sabbatical leaves separately, later. A society started up, eventually called, after a couple of other names, ASCILITE (Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education), and I and Geoff Isaacs happily went to their annual conferences and gave papers.

There was another society, too, called HERDSA (Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia), which also had annual conferences, so we gave papers for it, too, including a couple of visits to New Zealand.

Apart from those activities already mentioned or hinted at, we also ran workshops for academic staff on a variety of topics in teaching and learning, and I developed, along with Geoff Isaacs, a suite of programs (written in Pascal for the DEC Vax) to administer and score the student evaluation of teaching system that the University introduced; I believe we were ahead of the pack, but nowadays many universities have such schemes, so that students can give feedback about the quality of teachers and teaching. Geoff and I actually sold our programs to a number of other Australian universities; we would take turns in having an expenses-paid outing somewhere to install the software and train the administrators.

I will describe the rest of my career at The University of Queensland in the next part of this saga.

If you liked this, why not treat me to a coffee (or a bone for Kafka)? Thanks, mate!

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